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Request For Research: Basic Income

• sama 11y ago
  Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. I'd be very interested to hear thoughts from the HN community about what we could be doing here. Edit: please respond in the main thread so we don't get an unbalanced comment tree. I'll be in the discussion here for a couple hours, but if it feels like there's momentum in the ideas we might do a proper Ask HN about it next week.
• bishnu 11y ago
  It's worth reading about the Canadian experiments with basic income in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-what-the-poverty-advocates-forget-about-canadas-flirtation-with-a-basic-income http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-what-th... The experiment allowed households to opt out, and after a while most did. However this result is convoluted by the fact that the income was not inflation indexed, and inflation rates in Canada in the 1970s got quite high. The main conclusion from this is, basic income is going to have to be VERY carefully implemented to work at all.
  • MCRed 11y ago
    In the USA, if Basic Income were to be implemented, where would the money come from? Currently the rate of monetary inflation is quite high- we've gone from $11T to $18T in the monetary system during the Obama administration. If we were to start printing even more money to pay people a basic income, this monetary inflation would cause prices to rise to wipe out the benefit of the program, most likely. In fact, the reason people are suffering now is the level of monetary inflation (Which has been high going back to the Reagan era, so it's the fault of both parties. This is not a partisan issue- it's an economics one. And the problem is that politicians get elected by promising stuff, but to produce the stuff, they can't raise taxes, so they do the equivalent by printing money.)
    • AngrySkillzz 11y ago
      > the reason people are suffering now is the level of monetary inflation I don't think any respectable economist actually agrees with you on that. The increase in the monetary base during QE was paired with a collapse in the money multiplier. Most of that cash stayed in reserve at banks (see 'Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not "Lend Out" Reserves'). Price inflation is nowhere in sight; inflation is below historic levels and even slightly below the Fed's inflation target. As for the original question, the general idea seems to be eliminating most other forms of government welfare programs (TANF, SNAP, social security, etc.) since basic income will replace them, along with redistributive increases in income/capital gains/wealth taxes.
      • finance-geek 11y ago
        Depends on which inflation figure you count. When I think of inflation, I think of the largest costs first -- housing, which can easily be 30 to 50% of your earnings for most people. Check out the Housing Price Index -- does that look flat to you? http://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller-us-national-home-price-index http://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller-...
        • MarkMc 11y ago
          Well as house prices have shot up, interest rates have come down, so the cost of servicing a typical mortgage might be flat.
      • pdonis 11y ago
        > Most of that cash stayed in reserve at banks (see 'Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not "Lend Out" Reserves'). This is a very misleading use of terminology. It is true that banks can't lend out "reserves", if by "reserves" you mean the 3% reserve that banks in the "upper reserve tranche" at the Fed (which is basically any bank you've ever heard of) have to keep in their accounts at the Fed and not lend out. But the actual balances of those banks at the Fed are far in excess of that 3% reserve requirement; they are being kept in "reserve" by the banks not because the Fed requires them to but because the banks choose not to lend it out. Why would they do that? They aren't saying, at least not publicly, but the obvious hypothesis is that it's because their expected rate of return from lending it is lower than the rate of interest the Fed pays on their balances. In other words, they are worried about borrowers defaulting and driving the banks into insolvency and then bankruptcy, and the government refusing to bail them out because it wouldn't be politically acceptable this time around. So the reason inflation has been so low is that most of the several trillion dollars the Fed has printed in the last few years has never actually been put into circulation. (The doublespeak about "collapse of the money multiplier" is just a roundabout way of saying the same thing.) Which says nothing at all about what would happen if that amount of money were put into circulation, as it certainly would be if printed money was used to fund a basic income program instead of "quantitative easing".
  • objectivistbrit 11y ago
    Or New Zealand's research into the feasibility of implementing UBI: http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Working%20papers/Treasury-A-Guaranteed-Minimum-Income-for-New-Zealand%20.PDF http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor... Key takeaways: "An income of $300 per week is just over the average (mean) benefit income – therefore a plausible minimum income. However, paying a guaranteed income of $300 per week to every New Zealander aged 16 years and over, excluding superannuitants, comes at considerable fiscal cost. The fiscal cost of the GMI proposed in the first model (Model 1) is $44.5 billion (including the cost of all social transfers – in particular, New Zealand Superannuation payments, would cost $55.5 billion), requiring a flat personal tax rate of approximately 45.4%. Note that this tax rate and the others considered below are cost-neutral – not fiscally neutral – as personal taxes currently raise approximately $6 billion in excess of current social assistance costs." "Although the Gini coefficient improves under all models, many beneficiaries (including the disabled, carers and sole parents) currently receive more than $300 per week and would be made financially worse off under a GMI scheme. Therefore the GMIs considered could distribute money away from those most in need of government assistance and toward those who have choices and opportunities but choose not to work."
    • chii 11y ago
      this is actually a really good read about it. Perhaps a lot of comments on HN is skewed towards the young tech worker who sees himself as victimized in a souless wage slavery, but we don't hear any opinions on UBI from the truly needy - the homeless, the chronic unemployed etc.
      • ddod 11y ago
        The "truly needy" is a subjective concept. Determining who should get more money from the government is always going to be a judgment call necessitating the presumption that we're not all equal. Most people who oppose welfare, corporate welfare, or their implementations do so because they perceive the recipients are not "truly needy". UBI is the only just and democratic way to provide welfare.
  • Patrick_Devine 11y ago
    Here's another link: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-daup...
• harryh 11y ago
  $10,000 * US_POPULATION ~= $3.2T ~= The total annual tax revenue of the US federal government. Something to keep in mind when discussing this topic.
  • sandworm101 11y ago
    Or, in more relevant terms, 3.2T is about 1/5th of US GPD (~17Y).
  • dmix 11y ago
    Does your "US population" number include people <18yrs old, people receiving social security, and people who volunteer to not receive their basic income payment? They should be exempt from your calculation...
    • harryh 11y ago
      Yes. Since you brought it up I can provide those numbers too: Total US population ~= 319M Under 18 population ~= 73M Over 65 population ~= 46M --------------------------- Remainder ~= 200M No data on volunteering not to receive, though I don't know many people who pay more taxes than they're required to so I'm guessing that number would be pretty small.
      • dmix 11y ago
        So $2T not $3.2T. When compared to social security, it's not that bad: > In 2015, over 59 million Americans will receive almost $870 billion in Social Security benefits. Therefore basic income would be about 2.3x the cost of social security but 3.4x as many people would benefit.
        • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
          I think that social security is the wrong thing to compare it to. Try social security + unemployment + food stamps + aid to families with dependent children + ...
      • deleted 11y ago
• davidw 11y ago
  There's a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu ) , that I just read last night: > "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse, and that little of this decline is due to the loss of income; instead, it arises from a loss of self-worth." The idea being that a basic income is fine, but having people sit around idle probably isn't.
  • sama 11y ago
    I think this is one of the most important components to study.
    • dmix 11y ago
      Will this be possible to simulate if the participants know they are taking part in a study?
      • Balgair 11y ago
        That's always a hard thing to tease out of psychological studies. The tests have to be very clever to do so, and they'd have to be wide ranging. Essentially, yes, but it'll cost a lot of money.
      • JoshTriplett 11y ago
        And in particular, if they know they cannot count on the basic income indefinitely? Studies on this in the past have hit that exact problem.
        • mediocrejoker 11y ago
          I think if a basic income is eventually introduced nationally it will be the result of a hard-fought political battle with many proponents and detractors, and there are plenty of cases of laws like that being reversed within a few years. I don't know this would be too unrealistic for the study.
• mbesto 11y ago
  This is awesome. This is my favorite interpretation of a basic income and how it might fit in a capitalist society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
  • neuromancer2701 11y ago
    Removing minimum wage is a very important aspect because it allows teens to get experience early. Nothing kills teenage employment rates better than a 20$/hr mandate.
    • soperj 11y ago
      Or just do what Australia does and have a different minimum for teen agers...
• jmarbach 11y ago
  The Thiel Fellowship is a data point of basic income for 18 - 22 year olds, in lieu of continuing education in college.
  • benmathes 11y ago
    With some pretty strong selection bias which will likely make generalizations difficult.
• c_moscardi 11y ago
  A few good ones here - another really interesting, current initiative is Bolsa Família, a Brazilian assistance program that functions similarly to a basic income subsidy - the main difference is that it requires families to demonstrate up-to-date immunizations and good school attendance rates for children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia
  • gcb0 11y ago
    and since it was put in place by the intellectual left, there are tons of papers (most in Portuguese) about it. the one I'd recommend is an actual book "vozes do bolsa família". message me if you want more info on this. wife does a phd related to this topic.
• sebii 11y ago
  There is non-profit startup in Berlin trying to do this, they mainly fund themselves by raising the money from the crowd. It's a lottery system where one can win 1000€ per month for one year, which in most parts of Germany gets you somewhere. They already funded 29 people analyze and blog about who won. Most people actually didn't do dramatic life changes, which also could be because it's just one year. Warning German: https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/start https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/start
  • mattkrisiloff 11y ago
    It's a big reason we want to do it for 5 years -- things may look different in the longer term.
    • semafour 11y ago
      Is five years long enough to get a real reaction? Unless somebody is on the verge of retirement, and they want to keep working after the experiment, they must consider staying in the job pool or have difficulty getting hired in five years. To see how people would react to a government-provided basic income, which would presumably be fore life, the study may have to emulate that more perfectly. Nevertheless, I'm very excited by this project and seeing what comes of it.
      • entwife 11y ago
        Does the basic income prevent people from doing work? Or from doing work they hate? A correctly designed study will attempt to teach the participants to (1) have basic spending/expenses that match their income (2) procure the basic income from already-available sources (e.g. food stamps, subsidised health care, social security...) and (3) form income-pooling groups that provide/insure a basic income for their members. All three have already been done at a small scale. 100s of people in the United States currently practice #3, e.g. Federation of Egalitarian Communities. 1000s of people practice #2, e.g. Puna Hawaii or your local trailer park. I think basic income would have the effect of insurance, to allow individuals to take bigger risks and follow their dreams more.
  • 11y ago
• notliketherest 11y ago
  When I talk with people about basic income, my gut reaction and primary argument is that it contrasts with that fundamental human nature that's been show time and again throughout humanity - given a guaranteed, fixed reward no matter how much or how little you work for it, disincentivizes work. It follows along the same lines as why government instituted communism fails. Or why the first version of the mayflower compact failed - whatever was produced was put into a common warehouse and all the land, buildings and end product were communally owned. I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is - it's paid for by the working class) ultimately leads to the destruction of the economy.
  • deleted 11y ago
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  • ZainRiz 11y ago
    I would think that it depends on what you consider "basic income". If it's just enough money to scrape by (tiny living quarters, food and a tiny amount for clothes/toilitries, etc) then people won't be worried about survival, but they'll still want to get more money for things like having a house, cell phone, vacations, etc
    • samstave 11y ago
      I just had a weird thought about cell phones; I think that going forward, communications are a basic need. There was a startup in ~2008 that was attempting to provide "free" cellular service to its users who agreed to watch ads on their phones. If they interacted with the ads, they would get more service time... The Facebook phone was an utter flop - however, if they wanted to surveil the population, they may have done better by creating a cell service company and allow people to be spied on in exchange for a free phone.... That damages my DNA saying that -- but it would be a workable model for the long tail of poor people that love facebook.
  • natrius 11y ago
    A basic income doesn't remove variable rewards for work. It just sets a minimum. Very few people reading this could continue their current lifestyle on a basic income, so how is this going to make people stop working?
• davidw 11y ago
  Things got fiddled a bit here with the comments, but this is my response to "how can we increase prosperity for everyone?", although it's probably more a political problem than a startup one. Maybe it's just me that has noticed it in the past few years, but "fixing housing in the US" is looming large on my list of things to improve. It's not just San Francisco - the same debates are playing out in places like Boulder, or even here in Bend.
• TrevorJ 11y ago
  I wonder what basic income would do to cost of living? If everyone ends up with x amount of guaranteed income, does the cost of living eventually rise by the same amount across the board and basically negate it? It seems like rent-seeking behavior would come in to play here.
  • jdmichal 11y ago
    I often have the same inclination of thought with regards to university education and government-guaranteed student loans. If I'm a university executive, and I know that the average student can afford $X, and I know the average student can also receive a guaranteed $Y in student loans... Why would I not set my price at $(X+Y) and take the full rent that I can?
    • soperj 11y ago
      Only works if every university does the same thing.
      • amelius 11y ago
        Can you explain why "price creep" will not occur, i.e., universities increasing their prices with small amounts (say $10 a year), so that eventually, all of them will end up at (X+Y)$ ?
      • TrevorJ 11y ago
        According to a study be the federal reserve, it actually is happening right now. Education isn't a commodity product so this kind of pricing doesn't require collusion between different schools.
    • TrevorJ 11y ago
      A cursory search leads me to believe this may actually be happening: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/why-is-college-tuition-rising-blame-student-loans-fed-says http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/why-is-col... http://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/study-shows-the-impact-of-student-loans-on-tuition-increases http://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/study-...
• ohitsdom 11y ago
  Where is the application to be a part of the experiment group? I'd prefer that over the control group...
  • mattkrisiloff 11y ago
    It's too early to say -- we're obviously not experts ourselves on this kind of research, so we're going to look to the researcher who joins us to first design the study.
• murbard2 11y ago
  Once again, the discussion about the basic income is framed as "would people work or sit on their ass". This is a red herring. People receive free stuff all the time, from nature, from technology. In general, free things do not make people worse off, it's just more widely discussed, as are instances of men biting dogs. What people end up doing on a basic income is far less relevant than what people end up not doing due to the taxation burden of funding a basic income. It's telling that the post contains no mention whatsoever of studying the impact of the taxation.
• krashidov 11y ago
  If I am a participant in this subject and I am told that I will be receiving Basic Income for 5 years I might act differently compared to if I was told that I am entitled to Basic Income for the rest of my life. The observation bias alone might motivate people to do work and strive to achieve something with all of their time. Or, it might even cause them to lie about the things they're working on. It will be very interesting to see how they design the study, I think it has to be a little bit more nuanced than "Here's 2000 dollars a month for 5 years, bye."
  • lg 11y ago
    Yeah if it's 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that I was working on my art?
    • smountcastle 11y ago
      Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic income doesn't mean you won't work. I suppose there will be some who would minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many will continue to earn far more.
      • lg 11y ago
        If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.
        • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
          Seems to me that five years is a long time. I could work on a degree for the first four. Or I could work on retraining myself for the first two. Or I could just take the first six months off. Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...
• refrigerator 11y ago
  Might be of interest: http://www.givedirectly.org http://www.givedirectly.org
  • stites 11y ago
    Especially check out some of the research they have done which addresses some of the questions in this thread: https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly direct link to paper: https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapiro_UCT_2013.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapi...
• stevesearer 11y ago
  Opinions on Basic Income aside, if this were ever to become a reality in the US I'd like to see it be added to the US Constitution as an amendment because it seems like such a fundamental change to the structure and thinking of how government works.
• larsiusprime 11y ago
  What I want to know is whether Basic Income implemented with our current housing and laws about land ownership will just run afoul of the Henry George Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem IE, the aggregate value of public spending in an area tends to soak into the land value -- give everybody $X,000 a year and the landlords will dutifully raise annual rents by $X,000.
  • gizmo686 11y ago
    The Henry George Theorem talks about spending on public goods.
    • larsiusprime 11y ago
      How is giving a blanket benefit to every citizen in an area not a public good?
      • robto 11y ago
        A public good is a technical term in economics. One useful way of categorizing goods is to place them along two axes - excludability and rivalry. Public goods are categorized non-excludable and non-rival. Non-excludable means you can't stop people who don't pay for the good from consuming it - like clean air. Non-rival means that one person's consumption of a good does not affect another person's. Digital goods are typically non-rival. A cash transfer doesn't really meet these conditions - it's excludable, in that you can restrict access to citizens or to whomever. And it's rival - there are only so many dollars to go around. That said, I think inflation is a very real concern for any basic income scheme.
        • boxy310 11y ago
          Agreed. Another way of looking at it is that a pure cash exchange would filter through the market demand for all goods, and as a result the nominal value of all goods would increase through the mechanism of inflation, not just land rents per the Henry George Theorem. However, there is an input consideration of identifying where this cash infusion is coming from, whether from printing money or from selling accrued assets on the open market (as what the YCombinator crew would probably be doing, if they don't already have liquid assets devoted to this endeavor).
• lauraku 11y ago
  I am surprised that it's for only 1 researcher though. The data on startup founders seems to encourage 2 or more people to share the burden and have someone to more explicitly bounce ideas off of. It would seem to be the case that fundamental research like this would also benefit from the cofounder type setup.
  • mattkrisiloff 11y ago
    The researcher we choose will be fully a part of YCR / YC. He or she will be able to bounce ideas off us at any point, and we will help out however is requested.
• eanzenberg 11y ago
  One of the biggest fallacies of the BI movement is they suggest that when AI automates many menial jobs it will lead to mass unemployment. This assumes that the average person is incapable of more skilled labor, when history has shown time and again that people adapt to the changing workforce. Yes there can be lag but it's not insurmountable. Another problem I have with BI is it equally distributes assistance with no prejudice to those more needy, i.e. the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, etc. So you take many funds away from people such as 70+ year olds who are on medication, SS, assisted living (which cost >> BI provides) and distribute available funds to able-bodied people who are "discovering themselves". Further, having considerable able-bodied people leave the workforce by choice delays global human progress and achievement. Instead, I am for additional public-sector money being spent on country- and global-level goals which the private sector cannot achieve nor make profitable. These include environmental, energy, medical, transportation, and infrastructure research. By putting public money into these research fields (which is hard/impossible to make profitable) you incentivize progress in areas which further human progress that cannot be met through private means. If you instead incentivize able-bodies to not work, not only do you take money away from needy (not much savings in admin costs) but you delay human progress.
  • ufo 11y ago
    My worry about automation is less about people being left without jobs and more about that production ends up concentrated behind those with the capital to purchase automation tools.
    • eanzenberg 11y ago
      Which if you read my last point, would increase taxes on those where capital is concentrated to be spent on research I listed.
• deleted 11y ago
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• dmix 11y ago
  Canada has demonstrated that (single payer) public health insurance works better than America's current public/private model while our taxes are comparable to living in California. Yet the US political system has yet to even be close to adopting it. Data doesn't always translate to political persuasion unfortunately. I'd expect Canada to adopt basic income before the US does as well and possibly provide the data this study is looking for on a much larger and contextually relevant scale.
• marcell 11y ago
  I'm very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood. The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a] 1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional income support. 2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T! 3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available government revenue against our desire to help poor people. [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income, "all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere"
  • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    I've always heard it pitched as some sort of sliding scale. Basically you'd get a certain amount based on your level of current employment but it doesn't require many of the checks Welfare has. I've also seen people say doing a basic income then eliminate food stamps and welfare and it ends up being a cost savings. It sounds good in theory that this very odd system of income could end up _saving_ us money, but I don't actually know if that's true and is probably highly dependent on whatever scale is used when deciding how much basic income a person receives.
  • drabiega 11y ago
    Presumably progressive tax increases would accompany a guaranteed income such that some percentage of the population would get no net benefit, at the least. The point is that it's much cheaper to administer than traditional safety net programs and less nannyish.
  • cryoshon 11y ago
    I'm also a bit skeptical, which is why there is a need for experimentation on the topic. Aside from that: 1. You'd have the freedom to quit your job without fearing homelessness or hunger. Suddenly, you're a lot less stressed. 2. We are wasting trillions on making new fighter jets or new wars we don't need, surely we can cut those programs and then spare a few trillion for something more useful. 3. An open question, I think. The guidelines for poverty would likely have to be open to change in order for a UBI to work.
• mrschwabe 11y ago
  Interesting project, but personally I would be more interested to see the funding of a study on "basic financial freedom". The test is quite similar, but instead of giving them a basic income participants are still required create their own income - however, they no longer have to pay taxes on their income. They are encouraged to create businesses and those businesses are also free from tax, and those employed by said businesses are also free from tax. 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used to allow government to take our money ;)
  • lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
    So are they no longer allowed to use public roads? How about public utilities? Does the fire department show up at their "un taxed" businesses, how about the police? Can they hire students that received their education from public schools? The fact that there existed a group of people that posted that modern society would be even remotely possible without government is far more likely to be seen as ridiculous in 50 years.
    • mrschwabe 11y ago
      Yes they would have access to all that stuff because their taxes would be paid for by YC as part of the program.
    • deleted 11y ago
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• chubot 11y ago
  My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income. That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that. In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this, if we're not even willing to pay for the necessities of life? People still die from untreated diseases, and I believe there is significant research to show that poor health CAUSES poverty (rather than poverty causing poor health). If people are healthy they will likely be more productive members of society.
  • bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Basic Income is probably the most efficient way of giving everybody food & shelter. Giving everybody food and shelter through standard government processes would probably cost way more than $10K/year.
    • bluedino 11y ago
      10k/year isn't going to get you far with food and shelter in all but the lowest cost of living areas.
      • bryanlarsen 11y ago
        Yes, it pretty much assumes shared housing.
  • dcre 11y ago
    Seems like you're mixing up two arguments. Is the problem the cost, or the particular things provided? If the latter, who gets to decide what's essential and what's not? I'd be pretty useless without a cell phone and a laptop.
    • chubot 11y ago
      The problem is the cost... If we can't pay for people's health care, I wonder why we think we can pay for everyone's living expenses. Suppose one person needs $100K to survive. Is it moral to let that person die, and instead give $10K to 10 people as basic income? That's a real resource allocation decision that has to be made. I will consider the argument that the government would be less efficient at providing food and shelter than giving people the money to do so... that could possibly be true on a large scale.
• cryoshon 11y ago
  I am thrilled to see that there is some private interest in exploring the possibility of BI/UBI experimentally within the conditions of the USA. A properly executed study of this type could be definitive in the shaping of our society. I expect that some form of radical redistribution of resources is going to be the next modality of human civilization, and getting started on the colossally difficult questions (how to ease existential angst of purposelessness and how to kill the work ethic) is just as important as the very-difficult particulars of implementation (how the heck do we find what the right amount of money is, and how do we pay for it) and measurements of efficacy. I'm extremely interested in the opportunity to lead or be a part of this research group, and will be applying in the coming days.
• reasonality 11y ago
  Almost sounds like the plot for "Trading places".
• jonbarcus 11y ago
  Super awesome research project. Definitely something we should look in to for the sake of humanity.
• samstave 11y ago
  I want to add the following idea, which I have mentioned here on HN several times: I humbly submit this as my solo-founder, idea-only HN application; The Standard Pantry. The standard pantry is literally just that - a pantry of a set of basic ingredients that go along with a range of standard recipes and a weekly menu schedule. Provide this standard pantry as a partially subsidized offering and teach people how to make a set menu from the basics. Certain components used are refilled at a regular interval as a part of the standard pantry - other ingredients will still need to be purchased, perhaps in conjunction with basic income. The goal is to help people cook, themselves, more healthy and affordable meals. and overall increase their quality of life. --- When I was first learning the basics of cooking from my grandmother, she used to be able to tell me to the penny the cost of each meal we cooked. How some dishes were "$1.43 per person" etc... It drove home to me the value of cooking and not wasting food. Cooking is therapy as well. eating well / better is good for every aspect of life.
  • dublinben 11y ago
    It can be hard to cook a proper meal for yourself when you work three jobs, don't have a full kitchen in your home, move on a regular basis, etc. If only it were so easy.
  • ap22213 11y ago
    ...which requires surplus energy and sufficient free time
  • wavefunction 11y ago
    I am working on an app in this area which I envision as a free app available for anyone, and especially those on food assistance programs. Because these programs are administered on a state-by-state basis, the "onboarding process" for people joining these programs is non-uniform, but I envision the case-workers or government employees who are enrolling people in these programs can also let them know about the app and assist people in downloading and installing it. I am currently developing it on weekend free-time. The app will offer recipes geared towards cheap, healthy and delicious food. I am interested in encouraging better nutrition, budget economy, and assistive technology to people who may not have much in the way of experience or skill in selecting groceries, meal planning, or nutrition. Starting February 1st, I will be living off the amount offered by US food assistance, which comes out to $6.25 a day at max. I am interested to see if I can do this, and I intend to "bootstrap" from "nothing: I am planning to use a portion of my food budget for the purchase of cooking implements and utensils. I have spent January buying various provisions so I can get a better gauge on what I will realistically be able to accomplish and when. For instance, the first week I will purchase staples like rice and fruits and vegetables, along with olive oil and butter and salt and pepper. Some provisions will span multiple weekly budgets while others will require weekly replenishment, like fresh fruits and vegetables or meat. My father had to go on food assistance for half a year, a few years back, so this is an issue that is near and dear to me. He is fairly educated and already owned a fully provisioned kitchen but there are many people who may not and could use some help. I plan to "show HN" when it's complete.
• bsbechtel 11y ago
  I think a related question to ask is "What will people do with themselves when technology has displaced a large majority of jobs, and how will that be financed?" When technology has displaced all the jobs, the only thing that will be left will be research and the Arts. It seems both of those have an infinite amount of work to still be achieved, and technology will never be able to automate away those fields completely.
• AlexWest 11y ago
  Thank you for doing this. This is truly the kind of thing the tech industry needs to be doing in order to make a net positive impact on society and promote a more agile, results-based social super-structure. EDIT: So many of the comments here are obviously ideology driven. I am ideologically in favor of full automation and UBI but doing this kind of research will help us move forward in an informed and scientific way.
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Bernie Sanders at the recent town hall meeting asked for someone to tell a story of their struggles. A woman in tears told of how hard it was to get by on $10k to $12k a year. It makes me wonder. How happy will people who only get basic income be? How easy or difficult will it be for them to get simple work for a little extra income? Now there is a big difference in getting $10k for free vs scraping it together from 4 different crappy jobs. But still I wonder. I came away from that story less confident in basic income that I previously was.
  • glibgil 11y ago
    Why shouldn't basic income be $36,000?
    • forrestthewoods 11y ago
      Why shouldn't basic income be $100,000? Most napkin math proposal for basic income are between $10,000 and $15,000. That's quite hard to make work but it's maaaayyybbeee posssibly achievable. It's at the outer limit of doable but meaningful. In the US 36k per person would account for 66% of GDP. It'd be 85% of GDP in France. These are not viable figures.
      • arebop 11y ago
        It shouldn't be $100k because that exceeds mean income, and we don't have strong evidence about how much BI improves productivity. I think the reason most proposals are well below the mean is that we prefer a modest effective intervention, and the desired effect is to remove the hardship of poverty, not to achieve perfect income equality.
    • DominikR 11y ago
      10.000$ per person in the US would cost 3.19 trillion dollars per year. 36.000$ would cost the taxpayer 11.484 trillion dollars per year. The US governments actual revenue for 2015 has been 3.249 trillion dollars.
    • honksillet 11y ago
• reledi 11y ago
  What's in it for YC?
  • sama 11y ago
    YCR is a non-profit; we just think this is important and interesting. Though if it does turn out, years down the road, that basic income happens, I suspect we'd get more people starting companies and that would obviously be good for YC.
    • mikeg8 11y ago
      > we just think this is important and interesting. Not trying to kiss ass here but it's this type of thinking that sets YC well above the rest, IMO.
      • wesleyfsmith 11y ago
        I had the exact same thought.
• deleted 11y ago
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• puppetmaster3 11y ago
  Why not use primates? They won't game the results. There was some research done, I forget date and author, something about 'origin of species'
• kolbe 11y ago
  Are you looking to study this topic from a macroeconomic, sociological or psychological point of view?
• interesting_att 11y ago
  Really glad YC is pushing for research into this. This is a fascinating topic that deserves more research. There have many points in my life where many of my friends and I needed welfare just to purchase food. For all of us, we experienced unbelievable amounts of shame even considering the idea. As a result, two things happened. i) Some of us didn't go on welfare to our detriment. Not eating = decreased ability to be a productive citizen. ii) Some of us had to 'over-sell' to others and to ourselves our disabilities, out of the fear that we would be denied access to these services or be accused that we were gaming the system. The effects of overselling these disabilities were devastating on one's mental health. Having a shame-free way of getting welfare could be a great thing.
• dsugarman 11y ago
  I think about this a lot. I think privatization of wealth reallocation could be the best model. If you could directly inject capital into underprivileged communities to do social projects, you could have twice the benefit to these communities. I imagine a platform where you could see social project proposals or propose your own and have people apply to run them. You can pair them with experts, give them the funding and let them hire peers to help accomplish the goals. You then have given them a livable income as well as improved their community. I don't think it is as pure as a basic income, but rather than just redistributing wealth, it also creates wealth specifically for underprivileged communities.
• liamcardenas 11y ago
  I recommend this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_%28book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_... From wikipedia: "Allister Heath, deputy editor of the The Daily Telegraph, wrote that the book shows how the “remarkable work ethic” of Scandinavians has been eroded by large welfare states over time." (Of course, don't take wikipedia's word for it-- read the book yourself) My take-away: Heavy socialism has absolutely stifled economic growth in Scandinavia. During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net private sector job growth was ZERO. If you want to stimulate economic activity, instead of giving everyone $10,000 per year, why don't we just cut taxes and removed red tape. (I know that Scandinavia didn't technically have a basic income, but I still think that this material is completely relevant and very telling). Edit: I said "During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net public sector job growth was ZERO". I meant private sector. Major mistake, my apologies!
  • scarmig 11y ago
    "Doesn't technically have a basic income" is doing a whole lot of work, here. The key component of it is that it doesn't phase out with higher income, which would otherwise cause a strong disincentive to work. How strong compared to no phase-out is a good question, but that's exactly what research like this is good for.
    • liamcardenas 11y ago
      Very good point. However, I do not believe that the welfare cliff argument applies to job creation and entrepreneurship.
    • IanCal 11y ago
      > The key component of it is that it doesn't phase out with higher income I have never seen a version proposed where everyone receives more money after tax. I thought the key component was that there is no complex means testing (simply phased out through income tax).
      • scarmig 11y ago
• surfmike 11y ago
  "What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make. What could make a difference? - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate. - improvements in transportation. Making transportation faster and more comfortable means more people can affordably live within commute distance of prosperous urban areas (say, the SF peninsula) - advocacy: pushing for changes to zoning rules to allow dense, livable communities, bringing more housing to our cities. For example, imagine turning a shopping center + parking lot into a pedestrian-only mixed-use urban area, modeled on the best dense cities out there (like Tokyo, Munich, Stockholm, etc). This requires a combination of property developers with a strong vision, changes to zoning laws, and a strategy for overcoming NIMBYs.
  • samstave 11y ago
    - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate. You need to watch this: Digging down is for the 1% it would seem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0
    • surfmike 11y ago
      Yup, it's expensive so generally only used in expensive projects. But it's a way of manufacturing land (or rather, saving land that would otherwise go for garages, storage, or other facilities that don't need windows). This makes housing cheaper because you then need to pay for less land per housing unit.
  • larsiusprime 11y ago
    Georgism is another option to tackle the housing issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
• glibgil 11y ago
  Experiments in dense, but attractive housing are probably the gatekeeper to affordable housing. I don't see this talked about much. Affordable housing is a good goal, but until it can be done in a very dense way, it cannot compete with other schemes. One idea I have is to run genetic algorithms to create housing schemes that would seek to maximize sunlight, and privacy. The plan needs strong focus on sound proofing and technology to reintroduce ambient sound when desired. The plan would also balance the exposure of inhabitance to each other in their comings and goings and in their use of common areas. Finally, the scheme would seek to keep public as much of the area as possible to make it competitive for commerce and livelihood compared to other parts of the surrounding environment.
• loueed 11y ago
  The top reasons I support the Basic Income concept: 1. It provides a safety net for the most vulnerable in a society. 2. As automation and wealth inequality increase we will need a system in place to deal with mass unemployment. 3. Not being accepted at a job offer can affect the mental health of a person. Basic income gives people time to re-educate. 4. If it works for the royal family it can work for all of us. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/basic-income-royal-family-living-wage-economy http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/basic-i....
• shriphani 11y ago
  Basic income sounds like a very good idea. As a teenager, I saw this news blurb from the George Bush presidential campaign. A woman (single mother) was working three jobs to make ends meet and the audience engaged in a massive circlejerk. Couldn't help think about the incredible waste of a life - soul-sucking jobs that ensure this person doesn't move up economic classes, has no time to focus on self-improvement and gets to provide no attention to family. And then the next generation continues this cycle. In the 21st century - we must change our approach to governance - dignity for everyone.
• LargeWu 11y ago
  Stop thinking of startups as "startups" and instead as businesses. The whole startup mentality of prizing growth and valuation, at least from the outside, seems greedy, rapacious and unsustainable.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• grandalf 11y ago
  This is very interesting. I recall the first time I heard of a basic income proposal... Milton Friedman proposes it, calling it a "negative tax" in his book Capitalism and Freedom. Some kind of welfare state is always going to be necessary, so the ideal proposal creates an incentive landscape that is both humane and also nudges citizens toward improving skills and working hard. This is how we'd design a video game if we wanted to encourage socially responsible behavior. It's a silly accident of history that we haven't managed to do that in the real world.
  • DeBraid 11y ago
    +1 for Milton Friedman who almost 50 years ago described a negative income tax as the Revolutionary Subsidy. Basic formula for negative income tax is to apply tax rates on the basis of median income. Friedman offers maximum of 50% of median income as the largest possible subsidy. Assume median income of $50,000. Joe Smith earns $30,000 and therefore has negative income of $20k (median income - actual income). Joe would then receive a negative income tax of 50% his total negative income, or $10,000. The sum of his earned income + negative income tax = $40,000 / year. More here: https://github.com/DeBraid/investing-notes/blob/master/negative-income-tax.md https://github.com/DeBraid/investing-notes/blob/master/negat...
• legohead 11y ago
  Not exactly research, but reading The Culture Series by Iain Banks [1] has caused me to give a lot of personal thought on the subject. When AI is advanced enough to dominate everything and humans are left to just do whatever, what will they do, and will they be happy? That's not the focus of the series, just a side effect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
  • cryoshon 11y ago
    Yes, The Culture Series has informed my political thought quite intensely as well-- I only heard of it via HN about a year ago. "Money is a sign of poverty" is the thought that sticks with me the most. Why bother having a currency for resource distribution if resources are vast and there is no benefit to conspicuous consumption? People in the Culture rightly view money as an abstract type of coercion, and are abhorred by the ability to force people to do things that they don't want to do via monetary incentives.
• RankingMember 11y ago
  I'm curious to see how Finland's basic income system turns out. I think doing so would drop the omnipresent fear of being destitute and homeless, which would do a lot to improve mental health.
  • fsloth 11y ago
    Finland already has a quite thorough social welfare system - no-one is homeless unless they have a bag of other problems than a lack of income. Mental health - not so good. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide... You will notice Finland has way more suicides than US.
    • vesinisa 11y ago
      US is a huge territory, and differences in suicide rates vary quite much across both Europe and the US by region. Finland has only marginally higher suicide rate than US (14.8 vs 12.1) if you consider that Alaska and many states in the Western US have rates around and above 20.0 (per 100,000): http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
    • RankingMember 11y ago
      I think having a basic income would do more than ensure people have a place to live, as the social welfare system you mentioned gives them; it'd guarantee a minimum of dignity. People in homeless housing/shelters are certainly better off than in the streets, but, imagining myself in their position, I think I'd still feel like an outcast, out of step with the rest of society. If there was a way to give people a base level of dignity directly, that'd be the way to go, but I think basic income is an interesting avenue to try to do this.
    • flubert 11y ago
      Rates of homelessness: US: 633782 / 314000000 => 202 homeless per 100,000 Finland: 7877 / 5363000 => 147 homeless per 100,000 Based off of numbers from (YMMV): http://www.housingfirst.fi/en/housing_first/homelessness_in_finland http://www.housingfirst.fi/en/housing_first/homelessness_in_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+usa+in+2012 https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+usa+in+20... https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+finland+in+2010 https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+finland+i...
• Spooky23 11y ago
  The problem with basic income is that people need purpose, not charity. Look at the success of programs in Africa that give people the ability to make a living, not a bag of rice. One particularly moving story was about a group that got foot-powered water pumps into the hands of subsistence farmers, who subsequently were able to send their kids to school. At one point, the core purpose of monetary policy and central banking was full employment. Now, it seems to be stability and productivity. The political system is too corrupt to pivot -- but the private sector can, because untapped potential represents lost customers. I think we need to figure out how to empower people. We have all of these underserved communities that suffer mostly from hopelessness. How do we empower a handyman in the inner city to build a sustainable business that enjoys his neighbors? How do we bring vitality to a rural community marginalized by the death of farming and mills?
  • fasteddie 11y ago
    Evidence increasingly is showing that direct cash transfers to the poorest are among the most effective interventions, among randomized control trials in the developing world.
    • Spooky23 11y ago
      Define poorest. The great society handed out lots of free cash in the 60s and 70s, and it didn't work.
      • rconti 11y ago
        Define great society. If anything, parent's comment is more clear to me than yours. Both are [citation needed], but parent's hints at more detail.
        • andrewla 11y ago
          "great society" is not being used a rhetorical device to refer to a particular society; it is (I am reasonably sure) referring to the "Great Society" program in the United States [0] in the mid-60s. I don't know enough to address the claims in the GP, but they did frame their argument, at least. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
• ams6110 11y ago
  50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. Could not disagree more. This has been the ultimate motivator for all human accomplishment, as well as the evolutionary enhancement of all living things on the planet.
  • fsloth 11y ago
    Uh, are you sure? No one will starve to death in Sweden and thei businesses are internationally quite competetive. I would claim Maslows hierarchy is a pretty good model of human motivation - people strive for great things just to be admired and for the love of the art. Not everyone - but those that wont will not turn into Leonardo da Vincis through starvation.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• mattkrisiloff 11y ago
  Small update: if you're interested in applying for the research position, please submit by end of day, February 15th.
• tchock23 11y ago
  Great concept! Regardless of who you select to conduct the study, I'd like to volunteer the use of my software (FocusGroupIt - focusgroupit.com) as a way to capture qualitative feedback from study participants on an ongoing basis. That kind of ongoing feedback would be invaluable to capture the day-to-day experiences of study participants, and I'd be happy to volunteer my time to support the study...
• cryoshon 11y ago
  Re: what startups can do to increase prosperity for everyone: Find ways of destroying harmful institutions by replacing them with better ones-- a perfect example to pursue is the institution of health insurance in the USA, which is explicitly harmful to people, inefficient, inhumane, and completely entrenched in multiple other institutions. Find a way to get people cheaper and better care, and they'll flock to you. There's other ways, of course, but the gist is that rather than focusing on relatively irrelevant problems (getting takeout easier, booking flights easier, etc), startups could choose to tackle actually difficult problems such as political corruption, exploitation of the poor, existential angst, etc. These issues aren't traditionally simple to monetize.
• jfaucett 11y ago
  "Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying sociopolitcal ideas. The problem is, its almost impossible to change the laws necessary at a governmental level in any reasonable time scale. This is exacerbated by the fact that you are inside a "monolithic legacy codebase" in which you can only afford to make minor changes over many years to take you from point A to some goal which is point B, and you still can't verify that point B works in any practical way. Ideally, you could have at least an entire city (population ca. 50k minimum) where you could just try out all this stuff, and continually carry out sociopolitical experiments. I suppose that's not feasible, but any idea that goes in the direction of increasing iteration times and improving the testability of ideas like this would be a good direction I think. What do other HNers think about this?
  • maker1138 11y ago
    Hong Kong has become a Special Administrative Region of China and has it's own justice, education, and political system (mostly). I think it would be a great idea to have several of these regions across the us to "beta test" different policies to see whether they would be good or bad. Changing a policy or law of an entire nation is hard and risky; trying these things out in special regions, where you have a known trial period, would allow much faster innovation in the political space.
    • jfaucett 11y ago
      I don't see why we aren't doing something like this. Especially when you start looking at how much it might cost. Birmingham, AL has a population of 212k and a yearly budget of 390 million. (https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America's_largest_cities https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America's_la...) When you consider the USA govt spent about 70 Billion on R&D in 2016 (http://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd http://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd). That would be about 0.5% of total R&D spending.
  • seanabrahams 11y ago
    "I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying sociopolitcal ideas." One of my personal hopes with Basic Income is that it addresses this issue by providing a safety net so that people who's livelihood relies the existence of the status quo can be liberated from the incentive to keep the status quo. For example, our government creates a Department for Homeland Security to address threats. It employs thousands of people. What happens if the threats go away and the department is no longer needed? Suddenly thousands of people are out of a job. That's thousands of people with an incentive to keep the department in business, which requires threats to our homeland security. Multiply this example across not just government institutions but private as well. People have an incentive to keep their gravy train running, even if it does irreparable harm. We need to remove this incentive so we can have faster iteration cycles, not just for socio-political ideas, but all ideas. Hopefully, a basic income can remove these perverse incentives by giving people a safety net. They're not afraid to lose their job, or move on from a shitty job, because they know they and their family won't go hungry, homeless, or without access to medical care.
• lukasm 11y ago
  A leverage against slumlords in the same way social media gives leverage to consumers against companies
• danieltillett 11y ago
  What we need is to study is what changes we need to make to the education system to support societal structures post-employment. Mass unemployment is coming yet we are doing nothing to prepare the population. We need new "career paths" where people are prepared for a life without work so that things do not devolve into what we have seen in remote communities here in Australia.
• intrasight 11y ago
  >50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. Don't know where you live, but here in Pittsburgh anyway the soup kitchens won't turn you away just because you participate in a tech incubator.
• joslin01 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? Startups as a whole can do nothing -- it's like asking "what can car companies do to increase prosperity?" except that would be a little more reasonable given the amount of resources and relative free-time those companies have. In startup land, you typically don't even have a sustainable business let alone vast amount of resources lying around to fix the world's problems. They cannot be concerned with something this vague. What they can do is work on the correct problems that will put them in a position to make a legitimate societal impact down the road. Even better if they work on problems that is directly correlated to society's well-being. You mentioned food. If a startup could compete with the likes of Monsanto, but wasn't run by a bunch of scumbags, they might be able to create such a rich company that it starts shipping food crates free of charge to places in need. This depends entirely upon the kind of person running the company. Since I respect that you have to view startups in the aggregate, I would probably turn around and ask you, what can you do to fund better startups by better people with long-term Do No Harm terms? The terms might even be bullshit like "You will do everything in your power to help the world rather than just helping yourself." It wouldn't be something you hold up in court, but it would be a major internet foul to find out "Super Rich CEO" signed those terms and "Super Rich CEO" was found being immoral. With the leader's reputation at stake, you might have a chance at nurturing Good Guy CEOs. At any rate, startups have enough to worry about. If you want to help the world, you'll find a way. If you want to make a bunch of money and fuck the world, you'll find a way to do that too. The problem is cultural and resides at the individual level.
• DominikR 11y ago
  > 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. Is this really a problem in Western societies? I haven't heard of famines or people starving to death here. I believe that most people work for social status, so they can keep up with the people surrounding them. > I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income. Is this a good way to recruit researchers? After all you wouldn't want the researchers just to produce a paper that reinforces what you believe already.
  • melbourne_mat 11y ago
    "Is this really a problem in Western societies?" All the people you know are not starving. There are however many folks - even in rich countries - who would not eat without the help of charity programs. Many of them are living on the streets.
    • DominikR 11y ago
      Objectively no one has to fear starving to death as in our societies we collectively make sure that this is not possible. It doesn't matter how exactly this is organised, but it is a fact that we do. This can also be proven by the fact that there are exactly 0 cases of people starving to death here.
• SilasX 11y ago
  Related to the cost of living factor: what about research on the interplay between guaranteed income and rents? I get the impression that rents will increase to take up most of the guaranteed amount, based on how people allocate for living vs. discretionary expenses, but would like to see something rigorous. Example of the dynamic: Winston Churchill liked to give a story [1] about do-gooders who saw that a bridge's tolls were a burden on the poor, so they bought out the owner ... only to find that rents right afterward went up by the exact expense of crossing the bridge twice daily. Considering the necessity of this crossing, that was like a sudden basic income of the cost of crossing the bridge, and got eaten up by rents. But I'd like to see something more rigorous and what can be done about that phenomenon. [1] ctrl-f for "bridge": http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can.html http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-...
• zmanian 11y ago
  There are lots of interesting questions in an effective basic income system. Sybil and fraud resistance come to mind immediately. If I were in the top 0.01% of wealth, I'd really like to see research into basic income. It would help with deflationary spirals, social order in an automated future and increase the supply of good ideas because it would free more people to explore high risk areas.
• a3n 11y ago
  If there were a basic income, I might quit my job and look for a new one full time, rather than looking in my spare time, increasing the chances that I would find a better fit between me and the new company. There must be some utility or public good in that. That might also provide some needed competition for lower wage/skill jobs, since they'll have to compete with scraping by on basic income. As it is now low wage employees are disposable and disrespected; "flexible" schedule means something different at Best Buy than at my current engineering job.
• tptacek 11y ago
  Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based turnkey hiring solutions that outperform interviews for non-technology roles like marketing, purchasing, &c, so that people who avail themselves of alternatives to universities can get good jobs regardless of social signals. * Tools that make it possible for companies that today exploit the 1099 labor classification to cost-effectively offer benefits and handle taxes, to make on-demand employment legal and fair while remaining competitive. * Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners. * Technology-mediated services that drastically improve outcomes in K12 education. * Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care. * Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services. * Tools to improve engagement with local elections and make it easier for people to take flyers on standing for election. * Modernized fee and fine collection for things like traffic and parking tickets, which currently default out to "charging minimum wage workers $2,000 to get the boot off the car on which they happen to owe 3 parking tickets". * Similarly: a way to do things like enroll a credit card with your local government to automatically pay fines and fees at their reduced early-payment rate --- which is something you might be able to do without getting permission from local governments. Later: I added some things
  • mattmaroon 11y ago
    The flipside to your first point is that employers can probably get an edge these days by simply ignoring college degrees. If you're skilled enough at hiring to actually find good people, ones without degrees are probably undervalued by a significant margin.
    • tptacek 11y ago
      That's true in technology, which is why I qualified the second suggestion with "non-technology jobs". It's much less true in other fields, where the work hasn't yet been done to create evaluation rubrics that don't depend on signaling from college.
• gizmo 11y ago
  Regarding startups and prosperity for everyone. If "everyone" means "all US citizens" then startups can help increase transparency in government. It's much easier to figure out who to vote for when there's a clear picture of somebody's track record and who their political allies and funders are. Everybody should want this, regardless of political persuasion. If massive data gathering can't be stopped (and it looks that way) then the least we demand is real transparency. Without that there can be no accountability. Most political information people come into contact with is disinformation or shameless propaganda by some special interest. It is getting completely out of hand, but there's no obvious solution. If "everyone" means "every person in the world", then we need startups to fight for sustainable energy and universal education. All scientific papers must be freely available to everybody in the world (few exceptions, e.g. how to manufacture anthrax can stay secret). Music and literature should be available to everybody, preferably at no cost. A single college textbook costs a month's salary in many parts of the world. That's just cruel. There isn't much overlap between things that are super important for society and things that are profitable. The civil rights movement wouldn't work as a for-profit venture and future civil rights movements will be no exception. Often enough people who have contributed the greatest value to society never benefited from it personally. Duchesne or Flemming didn't get rich from their discovery of penicillin but the contribution to mankind is immense. In contrast the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation -- with their many billions -- struggle to make a huge impact. To really improve the quality of life across the globe a social revolution of some sort is needed.
• jakeogh 11y ago
  What a cop-out calling it "basic income". As if it's somehow "free money". Really it's just a further institutionalization of theft, of course making people more dependent on mother government. Imagine the debate, should we raise basic income by x or 2x? The solution is not more laws, it's less. For example ending the war on drugs would have a immediate effect on the lower income brackets. If I didnt pay >1/3 of my income to support our $T war complex I could hire more people.
  • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Nice job defining all taxation as theft without actually stating it. I can kind of see a basis for that - people with guns enforce that you pay your taxes. On the other hand, in the US, Congress decides on the budget, and we vote for those folks. And we don't seem to care enough about government spending to vote out the ones that spend a lot. And, if taxation is theft, what is your alternative? Government supported by charity? Government supported by printing money? No government? What?
    • jakeogh 11y ago
      Individual income and property tax specifically. There are other ways gov can raise money. Gov has the printing press (although I want to let people decide what money is and what to trade in). Gov supported by charity is usually presented as an absurdity, like nobody would earmark donations for the DOD, I don't think that's the case. Agreed that people just dont care enough, I think a part of that is the constantly re-enforced state of fear which promotes the protection racket.
• andy_ppp 11y ago
  I'd like to see this sort of research too... I'd also like to see things like the tax system be used to make changes to income inequality - both in terms of like for like pay as well as to some extent evening up the pay professions each sex choose to go into. i.e. if you are a woman you get tax off up to a certain amount because society screws over your pay for getting pregnant. I'd also love to see meat taxed on a trading system where by everyone would get a meat quota that was quite small - if you want to eat shitloads of meat great - go for it - but you have to pay someone else for their meat points. You could set the level of everyone's meat tokens for the year at a level to raise people out of poverty/or alternatively just to reflect the costs to the environment. I'll releasing more totally unworkable economic policies soon... :-)
  • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Your "meat points" idea is horrible, because it destroys market knowledge. That is: In a free market, there are two things, supply and demand, and they communicate via price. In your idea, you fix the amount of supply, for absolutely no reason. All that's left is for the price to move the demand to where it meets (no pun intended) the supply. But you're throwing away half of the ability of the market to respond - the supply side, and you're doing it for absolutely no reason. Um, unless you're doing it as research. That... might be interesting research, but I suspect that it will show that "supply and demand" makes a more efficient market than "demand alone".
    • andy_ppp 11y ago
      "for absolutely no reason" I thought manufacturing meat was destroying the planet? The whole point of the idea is to stop the supply side isn't it and the price of meat remains at whatever level the market thinks - the meat tokens are traded separately. It's simply that there would be a centrally planned amount of meat produced and it would go to those willing to pay the most for it. The tokens that everyone gets are designed to sweeten the deal for those who decide not to eat meat. Sure you can eat meat, but your quota is worth £4000 per year to someone. I'm not saying cap and trade has worked well for fossil fuels, but this is effectively carbon offsetting done in a better way. Unfortunately I'm not certain that capitalism has solved the problems we are going to face over the next century if we want to survive. If we leave things to the market completely all this cheap oil will ruin the environment. Needs to be taxed.
• avip 11y ago
  Maybe increasing prosperity for everyone in a finite (and diminishing) resources world, occupied by ever growing number of humans, is not feasible. I'm also not sure how we'll go about defining a measurable prosperity?
  • alexmat 11y ago
    You're observation is rational, but hard to connect with emotionally. Which is why these self defeating feel good efforts will persist.
• Futurebot 11y ago
  I'm so happy to see this kind of forward-looking work. The writing is on the wall with the constellation of automation, inequality, free agent nation/gig economy, the Precariat, the end of lifetime employment, and the desire for greater labor fluidity (on both sides of the table.) Taken together, these things make the GBI an incredibly important think to start thinking about right now. The fact that a prestigious organization like YC is interested in it is a hopeful sign / leading indicator. My ideas for making a GBI possible: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-missing-piece-in-the-basic-income-discussion-4b0646cad7e9#.tq5tnqmrg https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-missing-piece-in-the-basic... Short: figure out how to make essentials (food, housing, education, health care) cheap. Obvious, but thinking about how to get there is critical if for a GBI to ever happen.
• jngreenlee 11y ago
  Teaching people to control their costs, ala "mr money mustache" makes sense. I personally believe that you can control your costs and raise a family on $30k/yr if you are educated on the bad choices not to make...several cars on loans, larger houses than needed, etc...
  • jgord 11y ago
    I genuinely don't know how a couple could raise one child on $30k/yr - is rent cheap where you live ? If you had have asked me what a couple needs to raise a kid in the US, I would have guessed 80k.. maybe 60k if they are very careful with money management, as you suggest. I'm actually being sincere.. but where I live rent is very high, so perhaps that explains the vast difference ?
    • redthrow 11y ago
      How 'Mr. Money Moustache' Retired at Age 30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvJ4bwnAHnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvJ4bwnAHnE
• ThomPete 11y ago
  The first thing to realize when it comes to Basic Income is that it's purpose is not to optimize how the workforce will work out, but to deal with the fact that there will be no workforce in the future. In other words. If you expect ex. income taxation to be part of the way to deal with Basic Income it's doomed to fail.
• maker1138 11y ago
  One of the best ways to increase prosperity for everyone is to make living more efficient/affordable. Look at the average American budget from 2013[0]. The top of the list is housing. Figure out how to make housing cheaper and more resource efficient and you could lower both housing cost and utility cost, potentially saving people hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Other top items would be transportation and taxes. A $10k safe and energy efficient vehicle would be a great first step. Though it may be unpopular in some circles, the fact is taxation is one of the least efficient ways of allocating capital. You have administration costs, fraud, waste, and abuse. If we lower the cost of living for everyone, we can lower taxes as well and allow that capital to be invested more efficiently. [0] http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget
• xixi77 11y ago
  A couple things I am curious about: - Basic income is usually proposed as a replacement to some or all services and income support people currently receive. I wonder if it is feasible to simulate that -- e.g. adjust it downwards for people receiving more public assistance (other than things like medicaid of course), or paying lower taxes, etc. -- this of course would depend on the funding model(s) to which results need to be applicable. Otherwise, following the study, people will surely say that what was tested is very different from what was proposed. - Systemic effects would be relatively hard to evaluate with such a study, an example would be the change in both absolute and relative prices: e.g. I would expect that after a wide adoption, housing prices in cheap and mid-level areas might rise more than in currently expensive areas, because the added income would change the purchasing power of lower-income households by a much larger percentage -- or perhaps not. I guess it might be possible to try to account for things like this at the data analysis stage.
• twoquestions 11y ago
  One thing that I haven't seen considered is the cost and complexity savings of a Basic Income safety net over our current patchwork safety net, in addition to being more effective.
• finance-geek 11y ago
  @sama - since so many people here are in The Bay Area, i'll give the obvious answer for the region -- high density housing. I'm from NYC and we support a lot more housing in a much smaller area. This is accomplished by stacking upwards towards the sky. I appreciate there are earthquake concerns, but I also understand that many of the barriers for high density housing are political and social. I'll bet many problems in the Bay Area would be resolved with high density housing. A selfish list: shorter commutes (--> more time with family), lower rents (--> more people willing to move here --> fewer developer "shortages"), less cars on the road, less pollution.
  • sama 11y ago
    Yep--I'd love it if we could fund some high-density housing work. I also think it's a (for me, other people prioritize different things) good way to live.
• csense 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? Increase the range of opportunities that are within an ordinary person's budget. Nowadays it's fairly simple for the average Joe to buy or sell things online, create a blog, or rent small amounts of server time. Give people something they can do, and a way they can get paid for it.
• pdonis 11y ago
  > I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. I think startups should focus on the second, not the first. The reason is that the second is a technical problem, or rather a lot of different technical problems, all of which are exactly the sorts of things that startups can tackle and succeed in solving. The first problem, however, is a political problem. Startups are not the right tool to use to address political problems. That's not to say that startups can't play a role: they certainly can. But the role they play is to solve the second problem, and thereby make the first problem a non-problem. If all of the necessities of life were essentially free, because they were no longer scarce (for example, if food were as easy to obtain as air), then there would be no need for basic income because there would be no need for income. So startups can't solve the political problem in the usual sense; but they can "solve" it by making it no longer exist.
• clemensley 11y ago
  Honestly, I don't think that people sitting around is the problem with basic income - it's funding it. Say you are going to give each of the 320M inhabitants of the US $10k per year (that's about the poverty threshold). That would be a cost of $3.2 Trillion per year, or about 50% the total government revenue (federal, state, & local combined). I just cannot see a future where the US raises taxes by a number that anywhere close to 50%. Source: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/current_revenue http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/current_revenue
  • corin_ 11y ago
    Keep in mind that some of the additional tax would be funded by the basic income received by the rich (i.e. some people would get the $10k and then pay back $10k more in tax than they would have before, thus not gaining or losing - and of course some people will fall on either side of that middle line). Also, some social benefits costs would be cut, and in theory possibly also save money on currently-needed beaurocracy. Whether it all balances out would depend on how it was implemented and then your subjective opinion of how it would work, my point is just that it's not as simple as "find another $3.2trillion".
    • clemensley 11y ago
      Fair point. It seems that in 2009, 13.2% of americans have been living under the poverty threshold. Lets say that they make 50% of the poverty threshold on average (don't know the number). That would be an increase of 3.3% of government revenue. Plus the savings on bureaucracy you point to. Does not sound like the most libertarian plan ever, but it's certainly not unrealistic.
• jakeogh 11y ago
  "send them a cheque for $10,000 and increase their taxes by ~$10,000" which (suprise) just wastes people's time and money.
  • bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Replace "cheque" with "direct deposit" and what time is wasted? You have to do taxes every year anyways. And what little time is wasted is offset by the sense of security that $200/week is going into your bank account every week like clockwork no matter happens to you or your job.
    • jakeogh 11y ago
      I take issue with the idea that government should use violence to take from some people and give to others, the "You have to" (or we throw you on a cage or worse) is the problem. The money and time wasted is the huge infrastructure to enforce the ever growing list of restrictions.
      • bryanlarsen 11y ago
        And I take issue with the idea that taxes are theft. Without society, you'd be a subsistence farmer. Any income you earn above that of a subsistence farmer is enabled by society.
        • jakeogh 11y ago
          Society exists independent of taxes, for example we didnt always have a federal income tax, and there are states without state income tax now. There are other ways gov can raise money.
          • harryh 11y ago
            All of the ways that the government can raise money involves taking it from people. You're making a distinction without a difference.
• Uhhrrr 11y ago
  I'm really interested in what happens if the basic income isn't used wisely and doesn't change outcomes. What do you do when half the population is obsoleted by technology in that case? PR campaigns and cash rewards for getting a vasectomy?
• p4bl0 11y ago
  For those of you who can understand French, be sure to check out Bernard Friot's work on that subject.
• lars 11y ago
  This seems a little myopic. What distinguishes basic income from the welfare systems implemented in, say, northern Europe? Seems like there are many countries that have had basic income for decades. Couldn't you look to them and have most questions answered?
  • namenotrequired 11y ago
    The difference is basic income is for everyone.
• ebbv 11y ago
  This is really awesome and I am so glad you guys are doing this. Bravo.
• jsherwani 11y ago
  TL;DR: It's less about "apps" and more about people supported by technology. But I do believe startups can increase prosperity as long as growth (without profits) is the goal. From someone that spent 5+ years at the intersection of technology-based international development, there's a lot to learn about what works and what doesn't. Kentaro Toyama headed up Microsoft Research India's "Technology for Emerging Markets" research team and oversaw 50+ research projects spanning health, education, governance, and more. He then spent 5 years at UC Berkeley writing a book about what he learnt ("Geek Heresy", http://geekheresy.org http://geekheresy.org). I did a PhD in this general area (voice interfaces for non-literate users), and Kentaro's main thesis (technology only amplifies human capacity and intent) resonates deeply with my experience. It's all about the people, and technology is mainly an amplifier / supporter of human institutions. An "app for K-12 education" doesn't work in the traditional sense, but an app that connects awesome teachers with students, with an ecosystem that takes care of management, training, incentives, and encourages true mentorship, has a much higher chance of success.
• cousin_it 11y ago
  My short-term worry about basic income is that it'll end up bidding up the prices for goods that poor people buy, especially the rent. I won't be surprised if most of the basic income eventually goes to the landlords. IMO the right solution is to get the government involved in distributing certain goods, not just handing out money to buy them. The state could guarantee free housing, food, healthcare, education and pensions for everyone, on top of basic income for spending money. The USSR managed that with a fraction of the resources. My long-term worry about basic income is that people have a need to be needed by society and it won't go away easily. I don't know a good way to solve that completely, short of reengineering humanity. In the short term we could get away with making the government pay companies for employing people (the payment should be lower than the salary, but maybe not by much). That could be a nice supplement to basic income.
  • alkonaut 11y ago
    I think the key is to start from a welfare state that is the same size as the Basic Income system. That is, you have a tax funded system that pays for paternal leave, pensions, unemployment benefits, daycare subsidies, food stamps, and all other types of transfers. After that you make a transition to a basic income system, with a very small change in total transfers (e.g. 0-20%). This is exactly what would happen in for example Finland, where proposals have pretty wide political support now.
    • jamesblonde 11y ago
      Strange that the article made no mention of Finland. Probably because it's playing to a domestic audience.
  • flubert 11y ago
    >IMO the right solution is to get the government involved in distributing certain goods, not just handing out money to buy them. The state could guarantee free housing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_S...
• pj_mukh 11y ago
  Fantastic. Basic income should start entering the political vernacular in a massive way. Even in the short term, it seems like a more elegant solution to the progressive lefts "lets build giant infrastructure" plan. I'm looking forward to this research answering the basic revenue calculus. How much of the required spending can be supported by dismantling the current welfare infrastructure? How much would general productivity need to increase (and be maintained) to make sure the tax revenue can support this? Is there any effect of this on capital investment (the lifeblood of SV)?
• honksillet 11y ago
  I would focus on oligopolies that have formed or are forming... cable TV, internet access, banking, Credit Cards, etc. There need to be nimble competitors in these industries that eat away at the bottom lines of these industries.
• curiousgeorgio 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? The greatest thing a startup can do to increase the prosperity of everyone is simply continue trying to be successful, within legal bounds. Every startup is inherently working to lower the cost of living, whether that's their stated goal or not. Even a seemingly useless app startup - if it becomes successful - will (1) add jobs to the economy, (2) give employees and their families more purpose and well-being (working brings people fulfillment and joy), and (3) contribute to lowering the cost of living[1]. Obviously, some startup industries (education, medicine, etc.) have a more direct influence on this process than others, but they all contribute in indirect ways to increased prosperity overall - even if motivated by purely "greedy", capitalistic ideals. If basic income were somehow to be implemented by providing basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc. rather than currency) without the involvement of other people/companies providing those needs, then I believe it could work. The trouble is, even in a world full of automation (and less need for typical jobs), the resources will still be controlled by organizations, governments, and people - and not always the people who have the most need for them. In that environment (and lets face it, certain people, countries, organizations, etc. will always be better suited at doing things than others), the economy is actually zero-sum in the meta sense. No one can consume without another party producing - even if the producers at some point are just owners of machines. And in a competitive economy, things like basic income just become factored into the cost of living, so it's kind of a moot point. From another angle, if basic income is ever implemented in terms of currency ($x per month), it will not solve poverty. I have plenty of first-hand experience to tell you that a large number of people will choose to live in poverty (or forgo what most of us consider to be basic necessities) by spending that money in foolish ways (gambling, addictions, frivolous purchases, etc). Those people will not accept responsibility for having wasted the money, and we'll be right back to where we are now: people demanding more welfare services from the government. [1] A successful but useless (practically-speaking) app/game means that people are willing to pay for it. Paying for a good or service that otherwise would not exist contributes in indirect ways to technological progress (e.g., by gaining more adoption, the technologies powering that app will be in a better position to improve and contribute to aspects of our lives that have more practical value), including more investment into things that do improve our quality of life per dollar spent.
• jeffdavis 11y ago
  This is a challenging research problem -- perhaps harder than nutrition and diet research to answer anything definitively. In the present, everything is connected. Giving someone basic income may mean that they demand higher wages for, say, working as a waiter in a restaurant. But if you only give basic income to some people, then those people still benefit from low-paid waiters (which wouldn't happen if it were on a national scale). On top of that, it's a dynamic system. Traits like work ethic are partly cultural or passed down in families. Maybe the first generation of BI benefits more from work ethic, but it may decline in a few generations, perhaps undermining BI. That may not be apparent in a small study even of taken over a long time, because the participants will not be isolated from the surrounding culture.
• pcmaffey 11y ago
  Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? We need a better system for measuring and distributing the value of our work. We lose so much collective value because of the system of inefficiencies built up around how we quantify that value. When 70% of working Americans don't give a shit about their job, we're talking about trillions of dollars worth of "productivity" wasted... Prosperity comes from people doing meaningful work and exchanging that for an abundant lifestyle. I love the idea of basic income, and am 100% in support, but it is only a tool that will (hopefully) enable people to find their meaningful role in society by alleviating the struggles of poverty consciousness.
  • RangerScience 11y ago
    1) http://www.amazon.com/DAEMON-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731 http://www.amazon.com/DAEMON-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731 2) Industrial augmented reality is a real thing that is really happening 3) Data-driven economics It's my dream that some day we can know enough about how energy and goods move throughout society that everybody is more-or-less able to do what they want with their lives, and we use information technology to simply arrange them in groups such that civilization results.
• Bud 11y ago
  Did anyone else read this post, and think, "Wow, what a dream job. What an opportunity to actually study something in real-life with real people that could make a fundamental difference in the evolution of humankind." It is harder to conceive of a notion more beneficial to the fate of humans than the notion that all humans deserve the basic essentials of life, and that the first task of a civilized society must be to provide those essentials, without regard for any judgements of the worthiness of individuals. It should be assumed that everyone gets to eat and have shelter.
  • protomyth 11y ago
    I guess I did data consulting for one too many programs and read it as, "damn, that's going to be a hard outcome to work out and the data collection is going to be problematic. I hope they find someone who knows what their doing."
  • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >It should be assumed that everyone gets to eat and have shelter. Would this include intimacy? Consider that babies who aren't physically touched suffer extremely high mortality rates even though all other needs are provided (to the extent that even studying the effect is banned as unethical). This alone shows that physical touch should be considered a need. And then there is the topic of needing human emotional intimacy, where loneliness is shown to be very unhealthy.
• orky56 11y ago
  With regards to college tuition, the relatively easy access to capital via student loans has increased the cost of tuition over time. The demand for post-secondary is relatively inelastic since it is a strong factor in higher incomes down the road. If we apply this same logic to basic income, how can we ensure that basic income won't just further drive the increase in cost for all basic necessities that a basic income would contribute to (e.g. housing, food, utilities)? For better or worse, the only way to "control" the costs would be if each of these basic necessities were led by government institutions or regulations as well as healthy competition for the production. That is a large step politically and socially but may be inevitable if we want to see a basic income succeed. If anyone has any research or studies on related phenomena I would be very interested.
• mrtron 11y ago
  It isn't clear what we should optimize on. Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? The "idleness" seen in playing video games seems very close to most jobs. Many factory jobs have more mental idleness and less fulfillment than a video game.
  • Natsu 11y ago
    Yes, working at a factory production line is utterly mind-numbing (I speak from experience) even if one is bored enough to use the spare brainpower to perform all sorts of microoptimizations, but at the end of the day, one provides people with goods and the other uses up electricity to provide entertainment, so the value to everyone else isn't the same. And we do need to provide each other with value, or there won't be enough things to buy no matter how many dollars we have.
• newjersey 11y ago
  I think that there ought to be a maximum wage that is linked to the minimum wage (we can switch over the baseline to the basic income if we ever get basic income implemented). The idea is anyone earning over the maximum income[calculation] will pay almost all of the amount over the maximum wage as income tax. Calculation: I propose that the maximum income be a hundred times the current federal minimum wage times two thousand. The assumption is that a full-time employee works two thousand hours a year. Under my proposal, we will raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour which will set the so-called maximum income at $3M a year. Of course, we do not want to penalize people from making more money. Nobody shall go to prison for making more money. I just think that any income over the maximum income should be taxed at a higher rate which I propose should be 90% of the income over maximum income. If/when we get a basic income system working, we can switch the so-called maximum income to a hundred times the basic income. I hope the mega rich will support this plan as unlike the estate tax, this is not a tax aimed at the eroding their assets. As long as they do not take distributions from their corporations/ trust funds/ "charitable" funds, their assets should remain safe. I know the federalists will turn in their graves as I say this but we cannot afford to have state and local governments do as they wish. When Texas steals business from California or Kansas steals business from Missouri, the consequences are just the same as when China steals business from the US. We need to federally enforce standards that prevent some states and communities from being "business friendly" at the expense of the people. Edit: will the downvoter please care to say a few words?
  • notahacker 11y ago
    (not the downvoter FWIW) I think you lost most people when you suggested the status quo "mega rich" should get to keep all their assets whilst the tax system is redesigned to stop anyone catching up with them through entrepreneurial zeal and hard work...
    • newjersey 11y ago
      We already have an estate tax that maxes out at 40%. As long as we don't allow any more exemptions or windows, it shouldn't be a problem. We may quarrel over whether or not free lunch at work qualifies as income (I'd say it is not worth it to make a fuss) but use of corporate funds for personal expenses would count as income for the person if we are worried about these things. As long as the mega rich do not receive and spend over (for example) three million dollars a year per person, why should we worry about them? If they take over three million dollars and pay 90% off the top, they are more than welcome to do so in my eyes. The main thing is that there should be no exemptions for any reason. Exemptions, exclusions, deductions, tax discounts, and such are inherently examples of central planning. I can't believe that we would allow such communist ideas in our country. My goal is not to facilitate people to become ultra rich through "entrepreneurial zeal and hard work". It is just the same ignorance as shown by pg in his recent essay where he says that a startup entrepreneur who becomes a billionaire is somehow better or more desirable than a billionaire who inherited his money. What I want is to get a solid foundation so people are not worried about their next meal or a clean dry place to spend the night. If someone creates a new business process or a new gizmo that does the work that formerly took one thousand workers, well I am thankful to the person. However, we will still cap his payday at a hundred times the minimum living wage. I think it is a fair deal. People who do things should do things because they want to do things not because they want a big payday and become "mega rich". Edit: There was an article that I read the other day that said something along the lines of forget the mega rich the upper middle class is the cause of the decline of America.
• phkahler 11y ago
  I have a more fundamental question that I intend to work on at some time down the road, and it is this: How does the money flow, and at what point does it brake down? You see, if we give every person basic income of $BASIC, that money must come from taxes (else we just have runaway inflation). So ultimately every dollar spent needs to be collected in taxes. That's not to say it gets taken away by the government at the first transaction. The velocity of money will play a large part in determining the tax rate required to collect all the money back to the government. But that velocity will be low if a large number of people choose to not work. It also depends on propensity to save and some other factors. I'd like to see even the most simple analysis of this to get a feel for the math and what some obvious constraints it places on the system. Has anyone done this and published a blog?
• rdl 11y ago
  It seems a lot more efficient to do a tabletop or synthetic study, rather than outright paying people BI as a sample. Probably what I'd do is look at people receiving benefits equivalent to basic income. Disability is a good proxy for some -- you would need to correct for the disability itself. 20 year military pensions are another.
• patcon 11y ago
  Based on my own experiences of transitioning voluntarily into homelessness, I am very excited by the focus on lowering the cost of living. Living more simply, and getting there by a slow and intentional process (NOT coercive or painful), leads to more enjoyment of life, and less fear of failure. Funny how living in the presumed failure state of western society recalibrates your instincts. I find myself wishing that something like the process I went through could be institutionalized to a degree. For example, I had to be previously indoctrinated on the value of minimalist living. I had to be convinced that that was something that I wanted. And I had to consider all my habits and responsibilities, and what I might be willing to give up to get me to different outcomes. I had to understand how cheap it could be to exist in the city in which I live, and then cut in order to get there. I had to let friends know of my goals, and hope that we could create new traditions that sacrificed little and perhaps even strengthened our relationship. The whole time, you are altering your habits, testing them out before removing the harness. For example, when I wanted to stop requiring my bathroom space, I started going to the gym every morning to shower. Once I was used to that in my daily routine, I then started doing fitness and running while I was there. And when I didn't want to come back for food, I started putting together a minimalist meal plan that I could prepare in advance and take with me for the day. Reworking my habits and needs was almost a full-time job for a few months. Anyhow, I would never assume most people would want to take it as far as I did. Everyone's path would be different, as their responsibilities and routines differ. But that slow process of change if life-altering. I am now living in San Francisco for perhaps $300/month, and living very happily (perhaps moreso than ever), although El Nino is a recent complicating factor :) I will likely upgrade from hammock tent to camper in the near future, as I don't want to strain relationships with my partner. But up till now, it's worked very well. And I want to clarify that I would never see minimalism the goal, but just a means to happiness and resilience. In any process that might resemble my own journey, taking something away should always be a choice made for future benefit. Perhaps making that benefit more concrete could be part of any institutionalized program. Pay generously at first, but then expect costs to come down, and the more they come down, the more "reward". Perhaps that could be a retirement bonus. Or access to some sort of YC investment portfolio that would essentially be retirement reward. So the cheaper you learn to live, under the guidance of the program, the more of a nest-egg you earn. Anyhow, apologies if this is less than coherent -- lots of thoughts in my head on this topic. I am very not in the "tech solutionism camp", and am pretty self-aware that my experience would be less a prescribed path, but rather a general template :)
• endriju 11y ago
  Basic income introduces a few drawbacks: - talented people will not need to do consulting or daytime jobs to support their startups or side-project, which can lead to them living in a bubble - there will always be people who spend all their income on gambling, drugs, sex, whatever - with basic income they just have more cash to waste (although this could be controlled somehow) - low-skilled jobs aren't going anywhere soon - how do we want to motivate people to do jobs like garbage collection or road maintenance - this is already a problem in countries with exuberant social systems like France
  • maxerickson 11y ago
    Garbage collection doesn't need to be a low paid job. 1 garbage truck can service thousands of homes with just 1 driver (and bins that are designed to be grabbed by a mechanism on the truck). So you could pay a fantastic wage with a very modest contribution per home.
• brador 11y ago
  As a company founded on disruption and (mostly) willing phd dropouts i'm surprised you've set this at 5 years. Ask yourself, is the additional research in extra years worth it over what can be accomplished in x years? (1-2 years in this case). I say do what you've always done: fund disruptive ideas. In this case, research proposals with short timescales and big impact.
• nraynaud 11y ago
  I hope It's not coming back to bite me in the ass to say that, but I have been slacking and collecting unemployment benefits in the last few years. During this time I have re-kindled my interest in mechanics and electronics, bought and changed the electronics of a CNC router, learned to use it, learned a bit of woodworking, created the control software and tool path planning system ( https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode ). I have helped a guy on the internet with a laser cutting software, I have created an easy captcha breaker, played with Cypress PSOC MCUs (it's the gateway drugs to FPGAs), started a project that uses Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals (hint: you can control the 70V stuff with the parts destined for vacuum fluorescent display). And I learned a few techniques: - CNC cutting vinyl and using it as a stencil for painting or sandblasting - isolation milling of PCBs - PCB etching - CNC made wood inlays - using a lot of glues - learned a bit of Ember.js, lots of Chrome APIs - a bit of mold making - parametric mechanical CAD design Now, I have accepted a job offer and should start next Monday, so I guess all those projects and learnings are over, but that was a good ride.
  • kdamken 11y ago
    Question - how did you collect benefits for so long? The two times I was able to collect, the max was 6 months. I agree with you 100%. The time I spent on unemployment was very spiritually fulfilling and really helped with my career. I got into running, learned how to produce music, and taught myself to code.
    • nraynaud 11y ago
      I had one year without benefits, and the rest is because there is such a high unemployment country and such a high ratio unemployed/agency employees, that they can't really control anything.
• vesinisa 11y ago
  The Finnish social security agency (Kela) is currently implementing a study on basic income. You can read about their experiment here: http://www.kela.fi/web/en/experimental-study-on-a-universal-basic-income http://www.kela.fi/web/en/experimental-study-on-a-universal-...
• rbcgerard 11y ago
  How does this work with a broken immigration system?
• abawany 11y ago
  * In my opinion, the US healthcare system is a horrifying impediment to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. To answer your question: I wish startups would disrupt the healthcare industry in the same way Lyft/Uber disrupted transportation, AirBnb did for short term rentals, and Amazon did for online purchasing. These are controversial examples but all I ask of you is to go back a month before these respective services were announced and examine the convenience factor of your life vs. what it became after the existence of these services. While I liked how refreshing Health Sherpa was to use compared to healthcare.gov of the early years, I think a more fundamental disruption of the healthcare industry is needed. All the various middlemen with their high overheads, the plethora of paper pushers, coders (what a travesty of a fine word), etc. Some examples of healthcare niches that are ripe for disruption include supplies for disabled individuals, building provider networks not beholden to the Hades of the regular insurance industry, enabling medical tourism, etc.
• fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  Here are 7 pages which you may have already read, but may even still wish to read again while considering ideas such as UBI; especially if you are a critic of such things. By Keynes' estimation, those who are discussing such things right now are right on schedule. John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
• blackkettle 11y ago
  This was rejected by the parliament last year: http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/10/swiss-parliament-opposes-popular-initiative/ http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/10/swiss-parliament-opp... but is currently slated for a public referendum here in Switzerland in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016 I think it is one of really only four possible futures for human society [mincome, totalitarian, oblivion, expansion into the solar system and beyond (which will me effective status quo)].
• bischofs 11y ago
  I think this is one of those dreams that will always be pushed into the future. People will always want to own new things that come out even if we see them as useless. The cost of living always rises and people will want to work to afford it - and other people will want to work to create it. Automation will get rid of a lot of jobs but as a person writing code to automate engineering work currently this is not as inevitable and straight-forward as people think it is. These automated jobs will be replaced quickly with new jobs that can not be automated - just look at the current US economy as proof- you would think we would have automated a lot of jobs by now but we are at full employment.
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• deadowl 11y ago
  Thoughts: * Standards of living are variable, and especially so between different social classes. * Debt requires someone to earn more money than they would otherwise need to in order to meet the same standard of living as someone without debt. * The variety of higher margin products and lower margin counterparts create inefficiency in making consistent spending choices, particularly when it comes to visibility (e.g. marketing). * Healthcare costs can be extremely variable from person to person. * A big question is what it takes for a person to feel contentment. E.g. I have multiple family members living hundreds to thousands of miles away from me, from each other even, that I never get to see, and I would be a much happier person today if I was able to spend more time with them. Other factors can include obtaining a sense of achievement in what you do with your time, or a sense of approval from your peers. * People have a much smaller pool of peers to identify with if they don't go to a regular workplace or gathering of some kind. * There are regional differences in supply and demand, especially for property, housing, water, and egress. I'd include food, too, if I didn't think you were targeting the US. I can probably come up with more, but I'll just leave it at that for now.
• equalarrow 11y ago
  Is YC the precursor to The Federation? :)
• iMuzz 11y ago
  "Our idea is to give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period" In order to get realistic information for how people will behave / feel with a basic income we should seriously consider dropping the '5 year period' and extending it for the remainder of their lives. Personally, knowing that I will have to start working again in 5 years to support myself would drastically change how I choose to spend my time over the next 5 years. Also, props to Sam / YC for this initiative.
• scotty79 11y ago
  All of Silicon Valley should chip in and fund Basic Income for all SF. It would quickly become blatantly obvious that all bonus money would get sucked in by landlords. Basic income yes, but not without progressive tax on owned real estate that could curb rent seeking behavior of large property owners.
• Mz 11y ago
  In my opinion, "we tried this before" and it didn't work. We didn't call it Basic Income, but we have some historcal examples of large scale attempts to guarantee everyone gets a share. Famous failures include communism. I do not care how you arrange this research, it will not tell you what will happen under real world conditions. There is plenty of instructive data from the real world that you can look at. For example, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years. When people get unearned money, most of them piss it away. "Easy come, easy go." I have thought long and hard about this. I don't have time to write an opus on it today, and I imagine it wouldn't be welcome anyway. Here are a couple of things I wrote previously: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried-this-before-and-its.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-conversation-we-need-to-have.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-conversa...
  • ap22213 11y ago
    It seems like you're assuming that in our future there will be plenty of jobs for average people to earn a 'living wage' (i.e. enough to pay for basic shelter, food, clothing, education, medical treatment, etc.). What makes you confident in that given that forecasts of economic growth show significant stagnation and trends show increased automation of jobs?
    • Mz 11y ago
      There will be jobs, they just will require more education and/or skill than jobs currently require. This is always true any time civilization advances. The entry level jobs we have currently take more education and skill than jobs took 100 or 200 years ago. My father, who died a couple of years or so ago in his late 80s, was a high school drop out. This was not a big deal in his day. It was not a mark of shame or a barrier to getting a job. When Lincoln was president, the average education level of your typical American woman was 2nd to 4th grade (IIRC). Google stats for "big data jobs". It is expected to produce, directly or indirectly, millions of new jobs in the next few years. Trying to fill big data jobs is currently a challenge because of a skill short fall. It is expected to get worse. You don't want to get that much education? Then pan for gold. Stuff I have read recently indicates we have only found about 5% of the gold in the earth's crust. We are increasingly using precious metals, such as gold and silver, in the electronics to which we have all become so very attached. Gold currently is selling for around $1100/ounce. From what I gather, about 1/2 cup of gold would weigh as much as a two liter bottle of soda and could be readily sold online for about 80% of the spot price, totaling around $60k in income. It is unlikely we will be able to substitute automation for human labor any time soon for finding gold. Every single human that exists creates a need for labor. In human history, every time we successfully automate or otherwise dramatically enhance productivity, we raise the standard of living for everyone. When we do it stupidly and badly, we breed a situation that leads to a cycle of booms and busts. See historical civilizations dependent upon distribution of river water via some system in order to grow enough food. They develop a canal system and a complex bureaucracy to run it and every few generations the complex bureaucracy that runs it breaks down, causing the civilization to hit its bust cycle. Edit: Let me emphasize that: The HUMAN piece of the puzzle breaks down, and the whole system falls apart. You are talking about intentionally trying to create that very situation with Basic Income. Automation cannot keep working without human maintenance. I have no desire to live in a world where machines run everything and the last man who knows how to write the code that runs them or debug that code or do the repairs dies and the rest of the sheeple sit around waiting for it to fall apart so we can rebuild civilization from the ground up like a bunch of stone age cave dwellers. We had better find a way to educate people and distribute the work or we are incredibly, amazingly fucked.
• RivieraKid 11y ago
  It's important to realize what exactly basic income is, because it's a somewhat vague concept. People typically mix two different concepts, the amount of income redistribution (how much money goes to welfare) and the structure of it (who's eligable, etc.). What people usually call basic income is different from current systems in these points: - It's automatic, no paperwork or going to authorities. - It's simple, everyone gets the same amount - disabled people, people with children, etc. - The income jump from unemployment to employment is higher. But I don't think the difference is that big. Just modify a few parameters of the current system, perhaps change the level of income redistriubution to your liking and you have basic income.
• IanDrake 11y ago
  I can't take this seriously. >(Questions about how a program like this would affect overall cost of living are beyond our scope, but obviously important.) No, that's not just "obviously important". It's practically the ONLY thing that's important. If basic income raises the cost of living to the point where it negates the effect of having it, then basic income is meaningless. Here's your study. 1) Bring one piece of candy into an elementary school class. 2) Ask all the kids what they'll do to get that piece of candy. 3) They'll pretty much do anything. 4) Next, bring bags of candy into another elementary school class, give one bag to each student. 5) Now brandish a piece of candy and ask what they'll do to get it. 6) They're pretty much ignoring you at this point. Money has no value without scarcity and work has no value without ownership of it's rewards. Basic income makes money less scarce and (to pay for basic income) steals from people who work.
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    • IanDrake 11y ago
      >The times that BI has been tried have not had the outcome you describe You'll need to make a citation for that claim. >After that, if they want a nice car, a nicer house, they would have to work In your second paragraph they only need to work in order to have nice things, in the next paragraph there is no work to be had, so basic income is needed to eat... "The times that BI has been tried, people still work." vs. "You need a job to eat -- it's just a shame that there are no jobs anymore." You're in open contradiction of yourself. EDIT - To add, I think you misunderstood my analogy. It's not that the kids are suddenly lazy and don't want to work, it's that one more piece of candy isn't that inciting. You're going to have to break out another bag of candy before they're even paying attention to you.
  • nl 11y ago
    Right. All of this is true. But the point of a Basic Income is that it substitutes for other forms of income support/welfare. That's supposed to increase the incentive to work, because many forms of welfare are income dependent. For example, we often hear reports of parents who refuse to work because they'll lose some or all welfare payments and their wages will be net worse off. If everyone gets the basic income, then maybe this effect can be overcome. There's some reason to think this could be true - the marginal benefit of $1 extra at low income levels is much more than at higher levels. It's worth noting that many conservatives support a basic income because of this, and because the system will be much less complicated and reduce the number of government programs.
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• DanBC 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? Gamify budgeting. I'm on a low income (UK sort-of disability benefits) and I've got a budget set up, but I don't set aside anything. I should, and I should be able to. I'm more than happy to describe my experiences of claiming "employment and support allowance (work related activity group)" (and the transition from Incapacity benefit to ESA-WRAG; and the difficulties of working while on this benefit.) AMAA.
  • ASinclair 11y ago
    YNAB gamified my budgeting in a sense. I've found it keeps me motivated. Though their new web app needs some work.
• wtvanhest 11y ago
  This research is an awesome thing that YC could give to the world. I do have a few very specific, big concern though: >We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed. In order for this research to having meaning, we would need to see how the costs of things, especially real estate prices are impacted. One argument against basic income is that it would inflate the prices of basic goods and provide no real benefit. It would be worth spending a lot to figure that out. Also... > 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for a very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove this.
  • hellodevnull 11y ago
    >I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for a very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove this. You could look to many European countries for an answer. The unemployed receive welfare, now tell me how many of those are still motivated enough to do anything when there's no fear of hunger. Are these people happy receiving enough welfare to live a modest life, or do they strive to do more?
    • wtvanhest 11y ago
      I have no idea. That is exactly why someone needs to research it. Fortunately for all of us, YC has stepped in to provide some funding for the research. My gut tells me that if societies could work with basic income, someone would have figured it out a long time ago. There have been a lot of societies after all and people have tried a lot of different things. On the other hand, my gut is wrong sometimes. I think it is super interesting that we may get some well thought out research about this that we can hopefully use to do more research and maybe someday come up with a better system.
• alcima 11y ago
  Beyond just the amount, I hope your project delves into the issue of effective administration and levels of personal choice. For the first you can look at the recent bio identity cards and direct receipt of a basic income in rice in India. Radical decrease in societal cost and increase in personal benefit. For the second it is a question of where do I receive a basic income for - eg Tiburon or Temecula - and how is this decided and administered. For this consider the troubled hukou system in China.
• padobson 11y ago
  * Solve problems in hiring by hiring all applicants on a first-come, first-serve basis and then evaluating them for X days before recommending the best applicants to a client company. Scale this up by partnering with the government to eliminate traditional unemployment insurance. * Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no cost by using advertisers to subsidize it. Could this be done with food or housing? Would a farm running on self-driving tractors and drones be able to feed people w/ ad-subsidized food for free? * Lots of food gets thrown away because it's cheaper to ship it to the dump than to ship it safely to starving people. A startup could develop automation and logistics to make the costs competitive. * Divorce rates would seem to indicate that the traditional family is not the most economically or emotionally optimum method of living/raising children. This may simply be a side-effect of increasing lifespans (i.e. 100 years ago, the average marriage lasted 15 years before a spouse died). A legal startup that offers tools for building new types of non-conventional families to optimize things like economic standing, academic performance of children, or changing employment environments. * Micro-businesses in a box. Many businesses couple some talent or skill (e.g. software engineering, music, plumbing, creative writing) with administration (i.e. legal, marketing, accounting, invoicing, etc). Lots of startups offer to automate portions of administration, but a truly turn-key solution would allow a customer to simply input their skill, and the administration would happen automatically. * Crowd-funding life. ----An apartment building with 20 units costs $1mm to build. An affluent person goes to the bank and puts $300k down to build it, and leverages the other $800k. Why can't 20 families each invest $15k and pay a group mortgage instead of rent? ----A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10. Why can't a thousand families buy all their bananas for the year through an intermediary handling the cash flow? Could they buy all their food this way and drive prices down?
  • bkmartin 11y ago
    Farming is quite a bit more expensive that what you realize. Besides, this model doesn't even make logical sense. Follow with me... 1) Advertising is only worth it if the people who see your ads can and will buy your goods at a large enough rate to give you the needed ROI on those ads. 2) If people are so poor that they need free food then they won't have the means to make point #1 viable. Your second point on food. Yes, lots of it gets wasted. There are quite a few areas where we can talk about waste and food cost. The best way to cut transportation costs is to just improve farming in places where food is scarce. This is not an easy task, but a much better long term solution in every way measurable. Ethiopia is the shining example of progress in this area. One of the largest wastes of food in the United States is what slides off of our dinner plates and into the trash. This increases demand, which increases prices, transportation cost of both supply and disposal, increased cost in cooking and prep, etc. We could save billions a year as a society if we cut our waste. Divorce rates are the fault of the people that are married. Marriage, if the vows are followed, is amazing. Married people live longer and have children with lower crime rates. The answer is for people to actually stick to their covenant and make a marriage work. People need to learn to forgive, extend grace, and act selflessly toward their partners. Marriage is no place for rugged individualism, it is truly a team sport. A family where children grow up with both of their loving parents is the ideal situation. Situations are not always ideal, but at least we have something to strive for. Under the crowd-funding life section... aren't both of these sections essentially just co-ops? Not that they aren't good ideas but I think they do exist already and without the buzzwords.
• jl6 11y ago
  The 5 year period of this study will be a significant limitation. An important part of a guaranteed basic income is the guarantee. If I was in a programme that I knew would end after 5 years, I would be very concerned with things like maintaining my employability when the 5 years are up. In other words, while I would love to dedicate 5 years to non-commercial art and science, my option to do this is severely curtailed if I'm expected to re-enter the same old job market with 5 years less experience than my peers. But overall I am thoroughly supportive of doing the experiment anyway, as we do desperately need more data on this important concept.
• jl6 11y ago
  Additionally, I wonder if basic income can be effective while there are still shitty jobs. Right now, somebody has to clean the toilets, because there aren't yet robots that can do it cheaply enough. If you introduce basic income so that nobody has to do the shitty job, nobody will do it. But one day there will be robots that can clean the toilets, and then there will be no shitty jobs left to do - and perhaps only then can basic income take hold.
  • vkou 11y ago
    Which, according to the basic principle of economics, will cause pay for the shitty, but necessary jobs to rise.
• cloudwizard 11y ago
  Start with reducing the costs of basic needs. Shelter - micro apts, container based Lots of regulations make this problematic in short term. Food - Basic nutritious food should be cheaper. Currently, cheap food is not nutritious or that cheap. Even Soylent costs $2.83 and many do not consider that food. A meal should cost less than $1. - 2 ways that I have been mulling * Automation for on demand food * Mass production of simple meals.
• Kinnard 11y ago
  I don't think we can have the conversation about basic income without having the conversation about currency. Right now the government has basic(or really much more than basic) income . . . it can create the money it needs to do what it wants. And this trickles down from the President and the Speaker of the House to the foot soldier and the mailman. This is a feature of the monetary system and it is only challenged in rare, extreme, or politically charged cases. Perhaps we should think about innovating the currency to provide basic income to citizens rather than to the state.
• vbean781 11y ago
  Someone pointed me to a good book on this topic called "Scarcity" written jointly by an economist and a psychologist. It looks at what happens to our minds when we're in a "scarcity mindset" -- basically, we have tunnel vision, lose attention span, self-control, and the ability to plan long-term. Your mind is compromised, and that's a cause of perpetual poverty (i.e., if any of us suddenly became poor, we'd start behaving predictably like those who are low income do). Along those lines, they suggest a few types of things startups (or anyone) could do to reduce mental stress for people. For example, adult continuing education classes where it's ok to slip up or learn on your own schedule (thanks to technology). Or savings products for young people that start before they are desperate and living in a world of scarcity (and prevent them from going to a payday lender one day). Or a service that gets patients to take their meds without having to think (I think at least one startup is already attacking this). For things that require behavioral change (like making on-time mortgage payments, or saving money), maybe social pressure can be used in productive ways....like it is in microfinance groups in the developing world (small groups borrow collectively and group members encourage one another to repay). Anyway, just a few ideas...this is a great topic.
• arasmussen 11y ago
  I just published a Medium post about this exact subject: Tech Innovation & Economic Inequality. https://medium.com/@a13n/tech-innovation-economic-inequality-501b1c2b7fa8 https://medium.com/@a13n/tech-innovation-economic-inequality...
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• pasbesoin 11y ago
  Here is a basic sub-piece, that I think is a cornerstone: "Basic" (i.e. guaranteed, for non-esoteric treatments) health care. My personal experience has profoundly introduced me to the principle that the rest of my well-being and performance is founded upon my health. If basic income is too difficult or determined to be counter-productive, what about this?
• FrankyHollywood 11y ago
  A lot of people see problems in getting basic income funded. But is there is a simple solution :) Generate the money, just print it! Everyone on earth will get an equal quantity of money, every month. Now this money can be used in two different ways. 1) Buy natural resources 2) Buy services This distinction is important: When somebody provides a service, like fixing your bike he gets money and can keep it. When you buy a 'natural resource', like wood, corn or oil the money must be destroyed. What I hope to accomplish this way is several things: - Equal chances for everyone, everybody can buy the same amount of natural resources on earth. - Destroying the money keeps the total money amount balanced. Natural resources are limited so a limited amount of money seems fair. - The system makes adding value to the world profitable. You are stimulated to be creative and do something for someone else! - Perhaps the total amount of money will increase. This is not bad perse, rich people will get less rich. But everyone always has enough money to live a good life. This is the basic idea. How this should work in practice needs lots of work, but I'm really curious how you guys think about this!
  • stouset 11y ago
    Doesn't this mean the person selling natural resources to you get shafted?
    • FrankyHollywood 11y ago
      well, he has to destroy a certain amount by using the earth resource, but he can raise the price of the resource with his 'service' part. How much a resource is actually worth is the most difficult question. Perhaps environmental factors like CO2 and ecological damage should be incorporated?
  • fredo699 11y ago
    You don't understand what money is. If it doesn't actually represent real work, or some material good, it's valueless. It's just this weird stack of paper that shows up at the door every month.
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• johngalt 11y ago
  In the same way that PG described wealth inequality at the top, there are also a number of reasons people aren't prosperous. Certainly poverty can be a roadblock to someone who would otherwise be prosperous, but we are fooling ourselves if we believe that is the case for all. There are starving artists, but there are also people who will just do the minimum required at any point. In my opinion there are two problems here. 1. How to maximize the number of prosperous people. 2. Ensure that those who will never be prosperous still aren't going to starve. Incentives clearly matter in human behavior. Which is why I believe a negative income tax would be a better system than BI. Choose a livable stipend with free time or the alternative is digging ditches for very little difference in pay? I know what my choice would be. Conversely taking a low paying or part time job to supplement a negative income tax could eventually turn into a few years of experience on a resume to take the next step up.
• JoblessWonder 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? I think it might be best to create a different thread since this is a separate and important question than the "Basic Income" debate that is also interesting and happening in the same comments. Either way, here are my thoughts: You can take that question a few of different ways. What can all startups do within their current processes/products? What is a startup idea that will increase prosperity for everyone? What can startups do in addition to their current product to help prosperity for everyone? I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else. I think having productive people in our society who do not need to worry about the basic needs will increase the success of our society. If you don't agree with me on that, then everything below is probably not what you are looking for. I think that setting aside funding regularly to donate to non-affiliated non-profits would be a great start. Most startups don't have the capacity (or desire) to reinvent themselves as charitable organizations. Creating a curated list of non-profits across different factors that contribute to prosperity (education, housing, jobs) and encouraging companies to commit to donating would help. I taught a relationship skills class with my wife for people on public assistance for the past 5 years until our federal grant ended last fall. I honestly believe helping those couples be in a better relationship helps them be better parents which gives the kids a greater chance to succeed. However, when the grant ended we had to close up shop and shut down the whole organization. Funding for these types of programs is so hard to come by that adding anything to the pool would be a great first step. As far as what sort of startups can be developed to help increase prosperity I think you can segment it again into two views: The long view or the short view. The long view is done by helping ensure the future generation's increased prosperity. Things like increased quality of education and training, family life, and access to technology. The short view ones are things that would improve access to a basic level of housing, food, healthcare and education. Worrying about those things (and probably more) are going to make it harder for people to be successful. It isn't impossible, just more difficult. I think that gathering and analyzing data would be a great start for a startup. There is a ton of information out there. The grant I mentioned above collected surveys from thousands of couples nationwide over a period of years. I'm sure there are grants funding programs that are delivering information on all types of topics. Utilizing that information to help prioritize what is effective or whatever you can glean from it would be an interesting startup. Using that information to develop a wishlist of product ideas to fund would be interesting for a VC. (This isn't my best writing/thinking. It is just sort of a brain dump to hopefully fuel some comments by someone.)
• deleted 11y ago
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• rajacombinator 11y ago
  Startups already increase global prosperity enormously by targeting massive markets with scalable solutions. Ultimately, the way you make money as a startup is by offering value to your customers, i.e. increasing their wealth. Some examples of this include: Uber/Lyft, decreasing transportation costs and improving quality for millions, while creating tens of thousands of jobs; Airbnb, same thing for hotels; social apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc, increasing entertainment/information flow to users, creating new media careers; etc. So startups don't need to operate any differently than they do now ... Think big and make big moniez! One thing that definitely does not work are "social enterprise" startups. Distraction from the brutal realities of market forces ultimately leads these to fail while patting themselves on the back for doing "good." In the spirit of the question though I'll list a few areas I think have enormous potential. Money services and lending - very difficult to innovate here due to the iron fist of Uncle Sam and banking cartels. I think what's needed is either, 1) US-caliber teams operating outside the US or 2) products that skirt the law a la Uber/Airbnb but like those products are so positive with users that going against them becomes a risk for politicians. Health - outsourcing/telepresence, reducing the cost of basic testing. Again may need to operate outside the US. Legal - enormous value to be unlocked by standardizing and automating this field a la Clerky but better. Difficult to get lawyers on board, they are very good at extracting rents. Real estate - breaking regulatory capture of Realtors. End of life services - we're all in this market. It's not sexy so not much innovation. Education - it's so backwards that you can innovate in any dimension. Investment - despite nominal progress on things like crowdfunding, there really hasn't been a big impact yet by startups in increasing access to capital / opportunities to invest. It's still far too difficult to raise money for new businesses. Again, may have to operate outside of the US for this and consider innovative legal structures. Science - breaking the University stranglehold on credible scientific research through crowdsourced/funded efforts. Enormous potential to cheaply fund studies especially those that go against orthodoxy or corporate interests. Again may need to be outside US.
  • swampthing 11y ago
    Founder of Clerky here - trust me, we're working on it ;)
• Dwolb 11y ago
  My non-profit's focus is on early childhood education in developing countries. It's sort of a long time to see a payoff but economically-speaking these are some of the most efficient education dollars people can spend (it's a time in the child's life that has high leverage). You can read more about how we're trying to increase affordability here: www.sharedforkids.com
• skilesare 11y ago
  I've proposed a number of things at http://catallax.info http://catallax.info. It boils down to changing incentives. We are currently incentivised to get the most for our dollars in the present. When you change the incentive to allow for more reward in the future if you spend your today dollars 'better' you can make sentences like 'decreasing the cost of living' much less relevant to the conversation.
• TulliusCicero 11y ago
  > I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. I'd be very interested to hear thoughts from the HN community about what we could be doing here. Increasing rents in particular metros (the ones where the good jobs are at) is the most obvious and solvable cost of living problem we have right now. Pretty much all we need is to just permit more housing to be built, in the form of radically loosening zoning regulations that block dense housing. There, done. Housing in the bay area would still be somewhat expensive with more liberal guidelines on housing, but nowhere close to where it is right now.
• nostromo 11y ago
  I would love to see a GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/ https://www.givedirectly.org/) trial in first-world countries. Take a few people that would qualify for various public assistance programs (reduced housing costs, food stamps, disability, welfare) and instead just give them that money in one big annual lump sum. My hunch is that this would be more cost effective, particularly given the much lower cost of administrating cash payouts vs restricted use programs. But it's also possible all of the money would just go to drugs and alcohol. It'd be a fascinating study. (I realize this isn't basic income, as basic income is not means-tested -- but it'd be a great first step in that direction.)
• scottmp10 11y ago
  "We’re looking for one researcher who wants to work full-time... who are driven and talented but come from poor backgrounds." (please read the entire paragraph to understand the context of this) The combination of hiring researchers that come from poor background with the author's stated belief that a basic income would likely be a good thing makes the entire set up seem very biased. I like the idea of promoting research into the subject but I don't think this is the right way to do economic research.
  • namenotrequired 11y ago
    So hiring someone from the same rich or middle-class background as every other researcher will somehow mean they're less biased? You won't find people without bias, but you can restrict your own selection bias in finding them.
• codingdave 11y ago
  I'm not sure providing basic income for a group of people for 5 years is a valid experiment. That group would still need to improve themselves because their money will be gone in 5 years, and they would then need to have built enough of their lives to get a job or be self-financed. The other flaw is that they will be a unique group, not part of a population who all gets the same basic income, so their lifestyle choices will be dictated personally, whereas if everyone had basic income, culture itself would have more impact on choices. It sounds like a great idea to spend time and energy researching this... I just don't think the description as posted is going to hit the mark.
• stanfordkid 11y ago
  I am all for research into basic income -- and in fact a big believer. However I take a HUGE issue with reading too much into the viability of the system based upon research done on small sample sizes: "Our idea is to give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period" There is emergent behavior that arises in the economy as a function of the number of people given a stipend or living wage. For profit colleges are the perfect example. If grants are given to a small set of people the scale of demand necessary for such businesses to exist is insufficient. Crank up the number of people and a new market is created that allows for the existence of predatory "for profit" college businesses that take advantage of funds that would have otherwise been allocated properly.
  • johndevor 11y ago
    How can it be possible to run an experiment on basic income when participants know it will end in five years? The knowledge of it ending will change their behavior and encourage them to remain working.
    • stanfordkid 11y ago
      This is another great point!
• clavalle 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? One thing I've been kicking around, though I am not sure yet how it would work, is measuring potential demand for a traditional good or service -- a type of sentiment analysis to find gaps in the market. When I'm thinking about this problem I tend to imagine market gaps in physical space -- where could people use a sandwich shop or game cafe or a heavy equipment rental, for example. The traditional route, which seems needlessly wasteful in a world driven by data, is for someone who happens to have capital to come along and start a business either because they /feel/ there is a need, or because a similar business has been started in similar situations, or a similar business is raking in profits -- basically they guess (educated or not) at demand and spend a lot of time and money vetting that guess. Or, even more error prone, because they have a passion and decide to roll the dice. Then it either succeeds or fails to make a profit for a variety of reasons and their test is validated or not. With kickstarter proving demand for potential goods that can be ordered and delivered, there should be a way to measure spacial demand for a good or service and move the capital required to willing and able people in that area to get it started. Perhaps even collecting information on what particular business practices might have a high likelihood of working...distributed and generalized franchising based on latent demand. The idea seems particularly relevant in a discussion of basic income. If someone hates their job and are working only to stave off homelessness and starvation or to maintain some basic level of comfort and they are given the means to not worry about that anymore -- well, then they will likely try to figure out how best to improve their situation. What better way than starting a business with a high likelyhood of creating value for your neighbors? It answers the question: what can I do to to have the most impact in my community?
• crystaln 11y ago
  This is a great indicator that Paul Graham's oft displayed obliviousness to issues of morality and fairness in capitalism is being challenged within YC. Good news.
• cookiecaper 11y ago
  The most important thing that can be done for long-term prosperity is to eliminate almost all forms of debt. Debt ends up making everything cost (at least) 2x as much and is the reason why everyone feels the requirement to be perpetually employed. In the US, we've built an entire lifestyle on debt. I'm not talking about consumer debt here (though that's a problem too), I'm talking about the debts that are intrinsic to the system used to obtain a high standard of living in the US. Those debts are what keep most people shackled down. If you want to take a sabbatical because of a series of hard knocks in a short timespan, you can't, because if you stop working, you'll lose everything you own. If someone can take everything from you when you stop giving them money, you don't own it. That's the core problem, the core reason employment is so stressful and the core reason that losing a job is a major life negative. Want somewhere to live? You gotta pay that house payment and/or rent. Very few "home owners" in the U.S. are actually home owners, they're effectively just renting the house from the bank. Even 30 years after getting their first mortgage, most are not home owners because they've sold and rebought their homes several times over the years. Want (need) to drive to get somewhere? For a decent car, it'll be $300/mo for 6 years (+ insurance). You might be able to go a few years without a payment, but by year 10, most cars are going to be worn down to the point where they have to be replaced, and you'll have to start making payments on a fresh one. Want a decent job? OK, we're down with that, as long as you pay your non-dischargeable entrance fee of $50k+ student debt for the privilege. Actual skillset or competence is of little relevance for most professions. Make all of these things so cheap that they don't require debt, or make these things available in some attainable way that doesn't require debt and allows people to actually own something, and we'll have a huge portion of the problem solved. Of course, the powers that be really hate it when someone isn't in debt, because debt is literally free money; usury is the most effortless way to earn money in existence. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money by keeping the citizen dependent on them for big, necessary purchases. Perhaps the government could offer 0% financing on all of these items -- homes, cars, and education. That might be a start to breaking the debt cycle. Another thing that would help is moving back to multi-generational housing and maintaining a strong culture of inheritance.
• AC__ 11y ago
  This is my dream. Can banned anti-zionist/anti-globalist/anti-despot individuals still apply?
• AC__ 11y ago
  Also, good on you guys for doing something established academia refuses to touch.
• ianamartin 11y ago
  I'm half-way tempted to apply for this despite the fact that a) I'm not moving from NYC to San Francisco, and b) I'm probably not qualified. In spite of that, I have some real questions and comments about the constraints on a project like this. 1. What's the budget for this? In order to get any generalizable data, you'd have to set up your sample plan to be geographically and demographically diverse. In an ideal world, you'd need to provide for 1,800 subjects to get genuinely usable data. Research is rarely ideal, and you can infer from smaller samples, but how many subjects are we talking about? 5? 10? 100? 500? 1,000? Also, what constitutes a sample? Individual or household? (see 2, paragraph 2 below) 2. What constitutes Basic Income? I'd argue that Basic Income represents enough for all human needs to be fulfilled to some arbitrarily minimal extent. Unlike some other comments, I include the need for entertainment and sex among basic human needs. As well as catastrophic health care. Does that mean everyone gets a free PS 4? No. And I also don't mean paying for prostitutes. But some budget for entertainment of some kind makes sense to me, as does a budget for dating. Anything short of that fails, in my opinion, to be a basic income. It's more like welfare for everyone, which is conceptually different, in my opinion. I also think Basic Income should be adjusted for location and household size. Although it might not be the right metric, the most convenient one we have is centuries of data about total household income vs. household size. That's how the Census Bureau defines the poverty threshold, for example. There are a lot of different ways to think about this, and my opinions above are just that: opinions. The point I'm trying to make is that if this experiment is going to happen, what's the best possible scenario for measuring something useful? 3. How do we research what is happening without affecting the outcome? I actually have an answer to this one. I think it's inevitable that any time a government agency is processing payments, there are at least some hoops to jump through. Welfare has its process, as does unemployment. It's reasonable to think we can design a brief questionnaire that tracks certain key variables like productivity, happiness, artistic endeavors, anxiety (bonus points for using a wearable device to track stress levels?? Maybe?) . . . whatever. I'm not sure what those should be. But it could be structured in a way that is realistic enough that you wouldn't do any obvious damage to the study by observation. Once your location and status have been established, the benefits do not change depending on your answers. But you have to check in and request a payment on the 25th and 10 of every month (to guarantee payments on the 1st and 15th). 4. It's important to note that there will be some people who adjust to whatever income they are making and do nothing beyond that. I don't know what percentage that is, but the funders have to understand that at least some people will do nothing but sit around and drink or play video games, and that can't be a reason to cut them off, otherwise, it really biases things in a bad way. 5. If this is able to be truly representative, then you would have to expect at least some percent of the participants in the experiment to get into legal trouble. What do we do with them? If you set a condition that people stay out of legal trouble to get the benefits (a genuinely real scenario if we are trying to model how this might be implemented in the future), then you are tampering with your sample. If you don't attach such a condition, you're going to draw a huge amount of criticism for paying people to be in jail, potentially funding criminal operations of various kinds, and there will be a small portion of people who choose to go to jail who have been there before and are comfortable with it and live extremely cheaply while racking up the savings. That's a tough one. 6. Going back to budget: is there enough to do control vs. group testing? By that, I mean we have a control group that answers the same survey every two weeks, but only gets a small incentive to do so. Nothing even close to a basic income. Enough to get them to hit a website and answer a 5-minute questionnaire about their life for the last two weeks, identical to the one the BI people are required to answer for their payments. And how many strategies can we afford to test? If we have rep sample control, then we can rep sample a variety of strategies: pro-rated based on location and household size, flat BI same for everyone, or other nuanced approaches. I guess I've really seriously gone and buried the lede here, but Sam, what is the scope of this project? My experience in research is that there's not really an analogue to the MVP in the startup world. Research needs to be rigorous and correct from the outset. You can't hack something together that mostly works and then see if it gets traction and find bigger funders if it does. I'm not suggesting that's your line of thinking, but this is a big project. Getting meaningful, generalizable data about this is going to cost a lot.
• magicmu 11y ago
  I think disrupting the core components of our society that decrease and inhibit growth of wealth for specific groups of people would be the most effective way to increase prosperity for everyone. These components include, but are definitely not limited to: - credit (specifically housing and pay-day loans) - the necessity (real or imagined) of a college degree - quality and subject matter of pre-university education - utilities (specifically electricity and internet) - housing and rent To be clear, I'm not advocating the direct removal or destructuring of any of these things. I do, however, see these as disruptable (but largely ignored) aspects of our society and economic system that have direct, adverse effects on many groups of people.
• chuckschnitzel 11y ago
  I think the premise of this is wrong. 1. It paints an idealistic picture of the state: > It’s true that we have systems in place to give people > resources, but the bureaucracy and qualification > requirements make it a very imperfect approximation of what > most people mean when talking about a basic income. I'd suggest to ask why there is this bureaucracy in the first place. I'd suggest it does its job perfectly well. 2. It paints an idealistic picture of the capitalist economy: > I think it’s good to start studying this early. I’m fairly > confident that at some point in the future, as technology > continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new > wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of > this at a national scale. Machines do not destroy jobs. The social purpose for which they are used - profit - makes and destroys job. Put differently, I'd suggest to ask why this economy produces mass poverty when it gets easier to produce stuff. I recommend https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/what-wrong-free-money/ https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/what-wrong-free-mone...
• nfc 11y ago
  I object to the notion of unconditional basic income. I think the possibility of large portions of the population underachieving in their return to society while we are still not rich enough as society to afford it is very real. I'd propose a twist to this unconditionality. I'd much rather see a different brand of basic income in return for work that everyone can do in a relatively small number of hours per month (20h?-40h?). In order to implement such a system we need a reliable way for society to judge the voluntary work of its members that would justify the basic income. And a set of works with social value offered to those whose chosen work is not deemed worthy of basic income. I'll just try to make this more clear with a possible implementation of such a system. You are allowed to receive your basic income and do whatever you want as long as a number of randomly selected people consider your work worthy of basic income. A way to organise this would be to present what you have done in some kind of predefined format at the end of each year. These people decide if what you have done is worthy of you getting your basic income another year. Otherwise the next year you have to work in one of the state accepted ways to get your basic income (by teaching, playing with kids, cleaning the roads or whatever thing we as a society agree it's always worthy). To maximise the accountability I'd choose these random group of people in the community of the person who receives the basic income. They will have better ways to know wether what is presented is actually being done and worthy. These 'judges' would need to be anonymous to minimise the potential for social engineering to game the system. This is just an example, I think we can devise different versions of the control structures following the same spirit for works that do not adjust well to this kind of evaluation. Sorry for my grammar and english. Perhaps someone can restate this in a more readable way. English is not my first language and I'm not a great writer, but I hope at least the essence of the ideas behind this proposal pass through and can contribute to the general discussion.
• tanker 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? Make starting a business as easy as possible: 1) Have all the legal stuff taken care of through a web form that fills out all the paperwork in a standard way. When a business becomes sophisticated enough, they get a lawyer to customize their solution if necessary. 2) Provide simple business banking at the same time.
• jakeogh 11y ago
  It's inevitable that the threat of withholding 'basic income' will be used to modify behavior. Didn't pay your fine? Didn't do your taxes? Didn't take the shot? Post "radical" comments on the internet? On the no-fly list? On the no-drive list? Don't have a gov-issued InternetID™? Don't like robots enforcing law? No soup for you. Just wait until China couples it with it's human scoring system.
• laotzu 11y ago
  Basic income is an idea which has been made practical due to electric automation. Why is it then that everyone assumes the surplus created by electric automation should be distributed using such a primitive legacy paper based information system as the dollar? That's 19th century thinking
• ttcbj 11y ago
  I think the most interesting thing YC could do to promote prosperity in the US is some kind of 'fellowship' for technologists with an interest in helping the impoverished to 'embed' with social service organizations and try to learn how to help them. I don't think most people who frequent HN, no matter how well intentioned, understand the factors that cause people to be stuck in poverty, myself included. I think you would have to get close to the problem to have really useful ideas. I have ideas, but they are more like questions to be honest. Some ideas I have thought about in the past: * An app that helps people learn that they are in a failing school district, and helps them systematically develop a plan to get out of it. I live in St. Louis, and around the time of the This American Life episodes on the Ferguson schools, I spent a lot of time wondering how you end up sending your kids to the worst of the 550 public school districts in the state. The question in this case is: what are the characteristics of people who send their kids to bad schools, and to what extent can they help themselves if given the right tools? * An app that helps people find others to share resources with (shared living, etc). The idea here is that poverty may be driven by the breakdown of the family, which provides first-line social insurance when working well. Kind of like match.com for poor people with kids looking to team up. The question here is: Is there some subset of improverished people who are very high-functioning, but so limited by childcare and low-wealth that they cannot lift themselves out of poverty. If so, could these people be matched and help each other by sharing resources? * Trying to create a program that directly funnels kids from underperforming schools into computer programming and IT jobs without going to college. Perhaps to be hired by large corporations who will ultimately spring for night-school to round out their education. Here, I am thinking about a section from the book The Prize, where a bunch of Newark teachers go to insane lengths to try to get one kid with some athletic talent enough tutoring that he can achieve an ACT score of like 14 and qualify for a college scholarship. That strikes me as significantly less scalable than a program that tries to give poor kids a marketable set of skills coming out of high school. It would still be a small set of kids, but maybe larger than the number who have athletic talent (and its not clear athletic scholarships yield good outcomes anyway). The questions here: Could some non-trivial group of impoverished high school kids be funneled directly into employment with the right vocational technical skills and support from major corporations? With all these kinds of ideas, however, I think you would have to get really close to the people you are trying to serve to have any chance of building something that would help them. And that means 'embedding' with them for a non-trivial period and really trying to figure out what will work. None of these ideas are like startups, in the sense that I think in the best case scenario they aren't likely to scale very well. I think they are more likely to cherry pick a small number of resourceful/talented people who might otherwise have remained mired in poverty. That's better than nothing, but my intuition is that when you get into the details of poverty that there are no highly scalable solutions. Everything is going to be messy. These stories have informed my opinions on messiness: Netflix Rich Hill Undefeated Waiting for Superman Audio This American Life on Ferguson Schools Books Our Kids (Putnam) The Prize Work Hard be Nice Articles http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinellas-failure-factories/5-schools-segregation/ http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinella...
• silverlake 11y ago
  Robert Gordon, Econ at Northwestern, has a book out saying national productivity and growth rates will be very low for the foreseeable future. If you believe that, then you can only increase prosperity by redistributing current wealth.
• marknutter 11y ago
  If you want to see basic income in action, look no further than the various Native American tribes who operate casinos throughout the country. The results are not pretty [1]. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21639547-how-cash-casinos-makes-native-americans-poorer-slots-and-sloth http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21639547-how-cas...
  • wstrange 11y ago
    Perhaps there are other social factors at play.
    • marknutter 11y ago
      I have a feeling this would be the excuse a lot of people would make if basic income didn't end up improving conditions for the poor.
  • dyim 11y ago
    Perhaps - I wish the article went into more detail on annual disbursement size across the different tribes. It could be the case that certain basic incomes exacerbate poverty (e.g. the $1200 that Mike Justice receives from the Siletz tribe), while other basic incomes (say, hypothetically, 1.5x the poverty line) drastically improve quality of life.
• astockwell 11y ago
  I think a critical piece of Basic Income being successful is being able to count on it UNTIL DEATH. Unless folks can trust 100% that when they grow old (and unable to be as productive) they can still live "without the fear of not being able to eat", they're not going to buy into the system in the way that everyone hopes they will.
• metaphorm 11y ago
  sama asked: > Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? good financial services for very poor people in developed countries. the basic financial services that middle class and wealthy people have access to such as checking accounts, savings accounts, retail brokerages for purchasing investing vehicles (stocks, bonds, etfs, etc.), access to consumer credit that does not have usurious rates and predatory practices, tax filing assistance, direct deposit of paychecks, automated scheduled bill payments, access to in-network or no-fee ATMs, ability to build up good credit history and have a high FICA score, etc. all of these things that the middle and upper classes totally take for grant as basic infrastructure necessary for modern life are things that very poor people are almost completely shut out of. this is a HUGE driver of persistent poverty in already poor communities. this is one of the things that makes climbing up out of poverty almost impossible for so many people. a startup attempting to solve these problems would have to be willing to experiment with totally new business models that do not directly rely on exploitation of the customers to generate profits. it might be a lower margin business than, for example, commercial banking. it would be a great social good though, and it might even be possible to make a profitable business out of it too. edit: expanding on my point an important component of sama's query is "increase prosperity for everyone". how does providing financial services for the very poor help everyone? simple: it increases demand at the base of the economy. very poor people have almost no discretionary spending money and often end up as net drains on local economies, taking in money from government assistance programs while not contributing back to the economic growth of their communities. if the poorest people become less poor they begin to buy things with their newly available discretionary spending money.
• imgabe 11y ago
  Where do I volunteer to be a test subject in this study?
  • jarsbe 11y ago
    +1 here. Demand in this demographic will be HIGH
  • realkitkat 11y ago
    +1. I am a willing test subject. where do I sign-up? That said - given the cost of living here in CA, I would assume that in the eventuality of becoming unemployed for an extended period of time, I couldn't support myself with the basic income only and would need to look into moving to some less expensive areas. In fact, this is what was suggested in some discussion ( couldn't find a link ) I remember reading relative to Finnish basic income experiment cited in some posts here. E.g. unless basic income would vary based on cost of living in your region, it would effectively result as people relying solely on it having to abandon living in more expensive cities and areas. Which seemingly is a notion few politicians would want to put forward when introducing basic income. But when you introduce regional differences in level of income, you open a can of worms that seemingly leads to all kinds of potential abuse, managing which then prevents dismantling of bureaucracy that was the whole idea to begin with.
    • imgabe 11y ago
      That would be an interesting quirk. I think basing it on the average cost of living for the country would make sense. It might have a helpful side effect of revitalizing some dying towns if a bunch of people move to lower CoL areas to stretch their basic income further.
• xiaosun 11y ago
  How about instead of using a "basic income" to enable people to pay for living expenses (food, housing), how about cut out the middleman and just pay for food & housing? This could be a system of college dormitories that people can live in free of rent, and includes cafeterias that serve meals free of cost. Anyone can live there, with some sort of local government oversight. You want to live somewhere nicer? Make money and pay more. You fall on hard times or want to cut costs while working on the next big idea? You don't have to worry about not having food on the table or roof over your head.
  • 109876 11y ago
    I think you just described homeless shelters.
    • xiaosun 11y ago
      Except with better branding to address social acceptability.
• mej10 11y ago
  I am working on cognitive behavioral therapy-based software that aims to fix unhelpful thinking and behavior. It is like Joyable, but for more general thought patterns. I believe this can at least help people with their inner lives -- which can translate into benefits throughout.
• ggerritsen 11y ago
  Great initiative! I'm really interested in how this would turn out in the US. In Norway, it's been somewhat of a success, hopefully in the US as well!
• millermp12 11y ago
  so, wracking our collective brains to address the problem of superfluous and unequal forms of humanity? Cutting that Gordian Knot will not be pretty.
• JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  This already happens in lots of setups: social security, pensions, allowances, annuities. So there's lots to look at without setting up some stilted experiments?
  • rorykoehler 11y ago
    None of those are basic income or even offer remotely the same benefits as a basic income.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Now you're just being stubborn. Regular incomes that happen whether you work or now, are almost identical to the BI. How are those example different? Constructive arguments are more interesting than "No they aren't, neener neener".
      • rorykoehler 11y ago
        Hi Joe, sorry to come across that way to you. They're not the same because: -Social security (means tested, dehumanising and bad for self-worth/esteem) -Pensions (only handed out to older people who are probably in a less creative phase of their lives) -Allowances (whilst close it is unlikely to be completely unconditional and usually tied to an emotional/familial bond which comes with it's own set of baggage) -Annuities (this is the closest of the lot but generally only rich people experience this so it would be interesting to see what happens when given to less well off sections of society). Unconditional basic income deserves to be studied from a scientific perspective. Too many of our major political decisions are based on anecdotal evidence and they therefore don't achieve what they presumably set out to achieve. Unconditional basic income is a unique concept with it's own unique set of inputs and outcomes just as the concepts your mentioned are. We cannot just assume outcomes as that is bad science. We have to implement, test and analyse our results. If you are interested in this approach to governance I highly recommend reading this article to stimulate your interest: http://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/2015/12/08/this-is-why-finland-is-able-to-implement-the-basic-income-experiment/ http://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/2015/12/08/this-is-why-finlan...
• branchless 11y ago
  It's the price of land. If you give people basic income the price of land will rise to consume all other disposable income. Land value tax.
• gavingmiller 11y ago
  This has actually already been studied/tried in the 70's in Dauphin, Manitoba [1][2]. The experiment saw a decrease in accidents, injuries, and mental health issues. [1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-poverty-experiment-called-a-success-1.868562 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-povert... [2] http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-experiment.html http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-experi...
• nunobrito 11y ago
  tptacek, please don't apply racist comments on this article. When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction. Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.
  • ZoF 11y ago
    Why was this down-voted? Ask yourself this; If tptacek's comment had the races reversed, would you think it racist? If it's racist to say, 'most crime is committed by African Americans' why isn't it racist to say 'middle class white people are responsible for levying default judgements and financial catastrophes on others?' I'm a middle class white person. I don't wish ill on any black people, or any other people. I don't wish late fees, high default judgments or financial catastrophe on anyone. Why do I feel bad for typing this? Political correctness is ass-backwards. We want to be nice to each other, we want to live fulfilling, and 'happy' lives. Political correctness as it is actualized today lies in stark contrast to those goals.
    • andrewflnr 11y ago
      At no point did tptacek suggest that people in Ferguson were rioting because they had arrest warrants out for them. GP wildly misrepresented tptacek's points.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 11y ago
      It's downvoted because the Fergusun protests were not "because people didn't pay their bills", and it's clear the poster simply has no understanding of what life is like when you're forced to chose between paying a bill and feeding your kids. You feel bad writing what you wrote, because you likely have a bit more awareness of how badly everything is stacked against the poor from the moment they're born, but you prefer to focus on pointless semantic debates along the lines of "color blind" and decrying "political correctness" that are old and tiresome.
    • SwellJoe 11y ago
      "Political correctness is ass-backwards." Sometimes, something that people are calling "political correctness" is merely "correctness", and is not political in nature at all. The statement tptacek made about Ferguson was accurate, and five minutes (or less) of Googling could have confirmed that for you. To demand color-blind language in this circumstance is to deny the existence of systemic racism, and to make it impossible to discuss solutions. A discussion about Ferguson without acknowledgement of the racial divide in Ferguson is actively harmful to finding solutions.
• pinn14 11y ago
  Throwaway for this--I'll get back to lurking (I'm not sure what password I used). I read it. I agree. The way there will be difficult. I've been on unemployment and noticed how pointless the weekly reports were. This will get rid of a lot of systems that need to be removed. I make good money and stand to inherit great money, but I do hope for all sentient life on Earth.
• mkempe 11y ago
  Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx. This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit. This will free humans from labor and eliminate the power of capital. Thus, somehow, unlimited production will enable people to live according to the motto "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs", and people will enjoy egalitarian heaven on Earth. Marxism has been tried, and has failed, in so many places with such bloody results. Instead of wishing that somehow advanced technology will solve the inherent problems of Marxism, maybe we could all learn from the failures of that ideology, and revive an understanding of the world inspired by the words of Locke, Jefferson, and Smith, among others. I despair. Are we going to keep repeating the mistakes driven by the ideologies of Marx, Hegel, Kant, and Plato? For examples of the atrocious consequences of "basic income" divorced from free markets, see the Soviet Union, East Germany, Red China, Cuba, Cambodia, and more recently Venezuela.
  • selestify 11y ago
    The Soviet Union did pretty well in its early years, with GDP growth faster than that of the US for a time. Cuba is still doing pretty well compared to similar Latin American countries at the time of the Cuban revolution. Don't know too much about the others.
    • mkempe 11y ago
      Soviet Union: 7-20 million deliberately starved to death. [1] 1.5 million people executed during The Great Purge. [2] "Did pretty well". Cuba: thousands executed for the ideas they held; forced labor camps; and more than 1.2m fled 1959-1993 (about 10% of the current population). "Doing pretty well". Cuba was one of the wealthiest countries in the Americas, before Marxists took over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
      • obrero 11y ago
        USA: Extermination of natives, slavery, company towns and child labor, Jim crow etc. England: English colonialism from Drogheda to Amristar, plus the domestic Peterloo, child labor etc. Also, how many millions did England deliberately starve to death in the 1840s? Germany: I can list off what the Krupp/Voegler/Thyssen financed Nazi party did for a while, then go back to before that
• hectorxp 11y ago
  Did you mean everyone or US-everyone? There's a subtle difference there. Most comments here are so US-specific.
• jp_rider 11y ago
  I don't know whether basic income will be effective, but I hypothesize that its changes in incentives will reduce productivity and happiness for the majority of people. Personally, I’m more interested in a system where costs of living are drastically lowered. Subsidies could work, but I think technology could play a large role. Imagine a clothing factory where everything is automated. Raw fabric comes in and finished clothing comes out. With minimal human interaction, variable costs should be much lower. Customers might even be able to design custom clothes with software. Nonprofit organizations could be established to maintain the factories and equipment. Their primary goals would be to minimize cost, ensure quality, and maximize customer satisfaction. Obviously, such a system would require a lot of capital and technological advances, but I believe it is feasible. This idea could also be applied to other areas like farming, electricity, ISPs, etc.
• fooad 11y ago
  @sama I strongly believe that money is not the variable that has to change in the equation. I'd change the minimum amount of hours required to qualify for a full-time job (e.g. 40h / week). Most of us aren't %100 productive from 8am to 5pm. Meaning, employers wouldn't really see much difference. If you reduce a 40hour week to a 20hour week, maintaining the same salary for each employee, people would have more free time. More time to do something awesome, etc. While maintaining the same level of income. That's what we should be aiming for and it wouldn't require a dramatic change in our society. My 2 cents.
• ccvannorman 11y ago
  Speaking from personal experience, not having to work 9-5 at a dead end job has astronomically increased my personal well being, productivity, and contribution to society (ed-tech startup). If I had been born in the lower class and never had any capital/runway, I would never have been able to do my startup -- or at least not yet, and not with this much impact. 9-5 service jobs so that people can pay rent needs to become a thing of the past, so many lives and talent gone to waste.
• jgord 11y ago
  > What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? I agree with the fundamental dogma that startups are the best way we know to create good technology, which in turn benefits everyone. ie. the big wealth creators are discovering new resources and creating better technology. ( The big new resources are in space, or perhaps deep sea, so your back to startups to get there.) Extrapolating, it seems reasonable that within 15 years the cost of many manufactured items will fall dramatically and quality will go up - when 3D printing can print electronics and plastics intermingled together at good resolution, that will mean all our vacuum cleaners / iphones / laptops / TVs / cars / bikes / shoes are printed whole instead of assembling them from parts. Aside from consumer goods, we still all need high quality and cheap solutions for : education, energy, transport and housing. Cheap, high quality [customisable!] housing might actually be solved by 3D printing also [ but maybe you'll just end up paying more for rights to the land plot or sky space to host your dream pad ? ] Its worth mentioning the obvious, that Startups don't exist in a vacuum, they need the backdrop of founders and staff who are highly educated [ not to mention a functioning economy with capital, infrastructure, internet ] Personally, if someone gave me a basic income and a project budget, I would spend it on establishing Math Circles for students aged 10 to 15. ( My ideal version of math circles involves some hands-on programming in javascript, coupled with the typical tricky math problems to solve - https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/mathcircle-with-code https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/mathcircle-with-c... ). Id also like to see how we could scale out Math Circles by delivering them online. Education via this Math Circle format is a very long term technology investment, but has a high bang for buck in terms of upside for the planet and our species. As a parent it seems clear to me, we cant wait around for the government or established institutions to innovate in education - it has to be done in parallel and outside of the constraints of a formal bureaucracy. Think of each student as a startup you're funding - in that long tail there might be one or two Adas, Edisons, Einsteins or Mirzakhanis wherein almost all future 'value' lies.. but we're also making a wider pyramid of culture, diffusing out into the general milieu of artists, nurses, marketers, designers a slightly higher level of facility and intuition in math and science.
• dools 11y ago
  You guys should get in touch with Randall Wray from the Levy Institute
• terramars 11y ago
  probably too late for a meaningful comment - any screening you do on basic income recipients totally invalidates the point of studying basic income (and basic income itself), beyond some really basic stuff. my suggestion : pick a town / neighborhood / whatever at random (preferably relatively poor with a population between 500-1000) and give everyone living in it at the time $1k/month over the next 5 years (even if they move). i think it's safe / wise to exclude anyone who's retired or on disability since that defeats the purpose of the experiment as they already receive entitlement funds. how you handle children i have no idea. maybe parents should get a reduced amount per child? in other words, if you have qualifications like "poor and motivated", or even just "poor", then the basic income experiment is really a grant program. it's really important philosophically that you DON'T NEED TO DO ANYTHING to get basic income. most work is NOT VALUABLE. society is better off with more people being "lazy" and doing whatever they feel like, especially as automation increases in prevalence and importance. if 50% of people on basic income decide not to work, that's fine because the other 50% will be perfectly capable of doing everything that actually needs to get done, particularly with the safety net of not having to worry about failure quite so much.
• Rhapso 11y ago
  Would it be possible for a company to issue profit earning shares to every US citizen? Right now, that would be on the order of $100 a person per year for the most profitable US companies but it is an interesting possible vehicle for a company to push for basic income.
• keerthiko 11y ago
  Improving transit is a large opportunity space. Reducing the need for civilian-ownership of vehicles - reduces cost of living (cheaper than car ownership) - reduces number one cause of human mortality - frees up tons of parking-lot space for additional housing - reduces strain on roads offsetting transit maintenance costs - reduces pollution Focusing on optimizing and improving quality of transit rather than just having it for the sake of it makes a huge difference in the quality of life of the area. This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes, etc. The other space I'm thinking of is a lot harder for startups to attack, but is worth thinking about anyway -- international labor mobility. This requires world-wide cooperation to work, but there are countries like Japan and Sweden with declining population but still fairly difficult immigration procedures. The world's resources would be used so much more efficiently if it were easier to redistribute people based on their skills, needs and desires with places that had the space and resources to support them and benefit from them. Technology can certainly help here, but it needs a lot more logistical ingenuity than technology. Another one is reclaiming human resources -- prisoners and the destitute. Majority of these people are able-bodied and/or able-minded, yet it is nearly impossible to gain any value from them because of how society is structured around their status. If we had dedicated, streamlined processes to appropriately assess and reinstate these people back in society, they'd turn from a economic burden into an asset.
  • DrScump 11y ago
    <This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes> I don't know of a case in the USA where a public transit agency has done this without making transit worse. For example, this was tried years ago in Santa Clara County. Called "Dial-a-Ride", the implementation was that an individual could call for a bus to pick him/her up and take to a given destination. The theory was that an assortment of people would all have origins and destinations along a common route, so you'd have a de facto ad hoc "bus route" for that collection of journeys. But when you crunch the numbers even this ideal scenario, the time lag in chasing down and picking up the subsequent riders makes the trip time and length for the original rider uselessly long. Nevertheless, this went on for years, with the result being that a handful of individuals got chauffered around at extremely high costs. It was computed that it would be much cheaper to have taxpayers pay for individual cab rides for everybody. Eventually, it was dropped, but it continued in south county for additional years. And to this day, VTA is the financially worst-performing major transit system in the nation (as measured by percentage of farebox return on variable costs -- don't even ask about how much worse it is when fixed costs are added).
• phaus 11y ago
  I'm intrigued by the idea of a basic income, but usually when people begin to talk about it, I see a certain argument presented. A simplified version of the argument is as follows: "In a free market, if a certain subset of people start making significantly more money than they used to, the demand for things that this subset of people couldn't afford before is going to increase substantially. This increase in demand will inevitably lead to higher prices for the things that they can suddenly afford, which will essentially put them back where they started." Can anyone briefly explain to me why this argument is wrong? On the surface, it seems fairly reasonable. For example, the ridiculous cost of education is often attributed to the creation of federal student loans. Unless that attribution is also mistaken, it seems to represent a valid example of this phenomenon. Please note that I'm not condoning or even agreeing with this argument. Its just something I've been wondering about for a while. I figure there are plenty of smart people here that can probably explain it to me.
  • ctdonath 11y ago
    Supply is limited. Always. Increase demand enough, and there MUST be an increase in "friction" somehow to limit demand to match supply; otherwise, supply runs out fast favoring "first come first served" and suffering waste while "real need" goes unfulfilled. Raising prices is the most natural and appropriate (if arguably imperfect) way to apply such friction, generally equalizing the cost value to the buyer with the reward value to the seller.
    • phaus 11y ago
      I understand the argument. What I'm asking about, is whether or not it would negate the positive effects of a basic income. The people who argue against the idea of a basic income often use this argument as evidence that it can't possibly work.
      • ctdonath 11y ago
        The whole point of basic income is to reduce the friction for obtaining necessities ... which is increasing demand for a limited supply. Demand increases, supply either exhausts rapidly or finds some other way of increasing friction - usually by increasing prices, stabilizing right about back where we started but with higher prices. In addition, money itself is of limited supply. Reducing the friction for obtaining money results in increased demand for that limited supply of money. Demand increases, supply either exhausts rapidly[1] or finds some other way of increasing friction - usually by increasing prices (inflation), stabilizing right about back where we started but with higher prices. [1] - "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money."
• existencebox 11y ago
  Let me bring front and center something that has gotten a surprisingly (to me) small portion of this discussion: ENABLE MORE REMOTE WORK. Why am I living in a high cost area? Because this is where the jobs are. Why are costs high? Because thousands of other engineers essentially _need_ to do the same thing. So to answer Sam's original question with another question, in addition to merely making this a one sided "businesses must be more accommodating"; What can engineers do to increase remote worker availability for startups? (Companies in general, but inverted Sam's wording for more poetic "fit") What pain point solvers, major technologies, processes, etc are missing that would make truly distributed teams less of a risk, or more desirable? While I certainly think there are already great reasons (you get access to more talent potentially lower cost, more "diversity" out of box, more flexibility from your workforce and less overhead per employee) I'd be curious to hear how this dovetails with what the powers that be think are missing. (In the case that one thinks there are intractable problems re: remote, I'd also be curious to hear those for the purpose of confronting this problem regardless.)
  • usaar333 11y ago
    From my experience working with remote workers, problems tend to be bucketed under "loss of context". The remote worker misses so many ad-hoc (e.g. lunch with a colleague) workplace conversations that they end up knowing less about what is going on. Time zone differences further complicate thing (misalignment of working hours). Secondly, and something perhaps tech could solve, is difficulty of working on problems together. I haven't seen a good video conferencing solution that comes close to two people in a room drawing on a whiteboard.
    • mjevans 11y ago
      Working in actual VR would do it. Sort of like have an 'office' room of standard size and layout (no one deviates on the placement of furniture; decorations and quality might change). The slip on some immersive 3D thing and have an actual avatar that's mapped to the worker's actions. This includes drawing on the virtual white board. It probably also includes a decent face-rig and several other non-verbal communications.
• ctdonath 11y ago
  What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? Do what startups do: create new opportunities, for both workers and customers, at competitive prices. It's what startups do.
• arikrak 11y ago
  Everyone pretty much has basic income by the standards of a poorer place or time. The issue is people adjust their expectations based on what other people have. So things like air conditioning would have once been considered a luxury are now considered a necessity by many. People will likely feel poor if the average income is much higher than what they have. To get rid of the feeling of poverty one would need to make income more equal, but we know that's not so great: http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
• marcusgarvey 11y ago
  What can startups do to help increase prosperity for everyone? Help get money out of politics. This is fundamental. In the current state, all policies are tilted towards the most prosperous among us. We all know this. We need our public servants to be incentivized to work towards the public good. This is the foundation without which all else is futile.
• rokhayakebe 11y ago
  Help me find an abandoned city and rebuild it. Work with the government to get us experimental-close-to-full authority on our laws so that we may rewrite and change them dynamically. We pull Social Contract. We share everything. Money is only used to transact with others outside our city limits. Software.
• randyrand 11y ago
  I would love basic income. I could just stay and play computer games all day =) Relax and go out!
• ljw1001 11y ago
  Not sure any startup can fix the fundamental problem that technology moves too fast for evolution. Came from a long line of big, strong, not-too-bright people? You're kind of screwed. Not much call for that anymore.
• shurcooL 11y ago
  All I can add to the discussion is that I'm excited to see this, I take this as a sign of progress and us moving closer to a better future, rather than continuing on as things are (which isn't bad, but can be better). I hope it goes as well as I think it will.
• RA_Fisher 11y ago
  History repeats iteld, so it might be good to start by hiring a historian. The claims of impending mass unemployment that serve as the premise for Basic Income were common during the Industrial Revolution. For example, see the "Luddites" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Ultimately what happened then is that greater efficiencies actually increased the demand for labor. Supply begets demand.
• miguelrochefort 11y ago
  There is no such thing as Basic Income. There is no universal set of basic human needs. People will never be satisfied, no matter what you give them. We can't even agree on the purpose of Basic Income: - Is it an investment/bet that's expected to result in increased productivity? - Is it a way to preserve humanity? - Is a way to entertain the elite? - Is it just "the right thing to do"? To me, all of this feels like a primitive defense mechanism. People anticipate that they will become obsolete, rightfully so, and they come up with crazy strategies to preserve their relevance. Some even go as far as believing they can avoid this fate through fantasies such as "friendly AI". By letting their animal instinct take over, they miss the big picture. Rather than slowing down progress, we should all aim to make the universe more efficient. Namely, we should aim to preserve consciousness, with as little resources as possible. Think "The Matrix". The physical world is just too rigid for the mind.
  • omegaworks 11y ago
    >There is no universal set of basic human needs. Actually, a lot of people have thought about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
• AlexWest 11y ago
  It is always ironic when the leisure class who have enough money to do as they wish from birth become very concerned that the poor simply aren't EARNING the right to eat, sleep, and rest.
• greendestiny 11y ago
  An element of the future economy that I don't see addressed in this comment thread is the ability of technology to improve our ability to DIY. While AI may replace the need to hire labour, sufficiently shareable DIY technology may replace some of the need for people to consume the resources of others. Granted advanced manufacturing is likely to stay in specialised facilities, but with open source and self replicating tools we may be able to put power back in the hands of the masses. An obvious step along this path is 3D printing, but I'd argue that wikihow and other sites are greatly increasing the ability of people to meet their own needs. My own interest is in 3D imaging so that computers can reason about the world more readily, and not just replace jobs but replace skilled labour by augmenting our abilities. Personally I'm more interested in a future where we use our own machines to live how we choose, rather than be given a stipend to buy the labour of machines controlled by increasingly narrow monopolies.
• meric 11y ago
  Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?...but decreasing the cost of living as well. I note decreasing the cost of living is by definition deflation. Preventing deflation is an explicit objective of central banks around the world. I think there are gaps in our economic knowledge. There are different types of deflation, such as deflation through technology, deflation through a economy restructuring itself, deflation through cyclical unemployment. Central banks don't differentiate between them, and do all they can to prevent all of them from happening. It's like taking immune system suppressants because the white blood cell count is high, no matter the situation, even when it's high because you've got a cold. Therefore, I think startups that can be involved in increasing our knowledge of the economics can increase prosperity for everyone, so central banks don't perform actions that prevent people from becoming prosperous.
  • api 11y ago
    The central problem for a long time has been that central banks have done this with the effect being rising prices (or at least prevention of deflation) almost everywhere except wages.
• petra 11y ago
  @sama: i think you've chosen the wrong format to do this. To lower cost of living, i.e. transform the economy is a huge task , that would require much more research effort than a thread. On the other hand , you've got access to an extremely talented and large group of people, and if you steered them towards a group of sub communities all highly focused on working together to find solutions to each of the individual sub problems - than i'm sure we'll see lots of great ideas and insights. That's all assuming it's possible to build such collaboration. But the goal is so appealing to many , so i think it's possible.
• jpmcglone 11y ago
  What if some companies experimented with basic income? I mean, sure, people working there are probably already getting paid pretty well, and 'basic income' at that point might just seem like a small bonus to their salary, but what if it was implemented like we implemented life insurance? Hear me out: So, you work at Company X. You and one person of your choice are now entitled to basic income. It will come as a separate check, paid for by the company. You can put your spouse, your family member, or a friend--etc. as a beneficiary of the basic income, or choose nobody at all and miss out on this "free money". That person would have to agree to accept the money of course, and the check will be written directly to them, not you (you are not a proxy). One main difference between this and an actual implementation of basic income is that these individuals will only receive the basic income as long as you work at Company X (unless, for some reason, the Company agrees to continue the program beyond your employment). Another difference is that it's linked to the success and failures of this company, instead of the successes and failures of society as a whole (the latter seems less risky). Anyway, I'm posting this more as a prompt.. What if? Do you think it's a reasonable experiment for a company to run? I know big names like Google and Facebook have some interesting perks, so why not basic income for all your employees plus 1 person of their choice, paid for by a flat % of everyone's income at the company?
  • Chinjut 11y ago
    As you already noted, this doesn't seem much like basic income (as payment regardless of employment is the sine qua non of basic income). This just seems like an augmented salary, slightly unusually paid out.
    • jpmcglone 11y ago
      Semantics. Isn't that all basic income is? That money is coming out of the pockets of people making income. That income is coming from the pockets of employers.
• mikerichards 11y ago
  giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached There's always strings attached, either directly or indirectly. 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. Considering current political trends, I find it significantly likely that in 50 years government would use fear of many different things as a tactic to "motivate" people (food among them).
• miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Human maintenance is inexpensive. Give every person: - a "capsule"-style room (2m x 1m x 1m) - a set of merino wool clothes (washed weekly) - a pair of shoes - a meal a day (1500 calories, high fat, low carb) - unlimited drinkable water - a weekly body maintenance (shower, nail clipping, hair trimming, mouth cleaning, ...) - a bi-annual physical exam (weight, urine analysis, blood analysis, scan, eye exam, ...) - a portable computer / tablet / VR headset (on demand) - access to public spaces (indoor and outdoor) Basically, this would cost a person about $200/month (all included). You would own nothing, but also have nothing to maintain or worry about (other than your mind). The ONLY thing that stops this from happening, is the government and its regulations.
  • unethical_ban 11y ago
    The idea is interesting, but to call 2m x 1m x 1m anything but a coffin or a bed-in-a-box or a closet would be disingenuous. It's certainly not a "room". Another point: Is anything actually stopping this? If a municipal government wanted to provide all of this to its residents, or even a magnate, I don't think anything stops it.
    • miguelrochefort 11y ago
      I don't care what size the room is when I sleep. A bed is for sleeping, or passive entertainment. This doesn't require more than 2x1x1. The government and cities have restriction concerning living spaces. I am not allowed to live in a tiny house, I can't rent an appartment that's smaller than a certain size. I wish I could pay $100/month for just a bed, a sink, a power outlet, wifi and controlled climate (21 degree celcius).
      • unethical_ban 11y ago
        Honest question: Is this nationwide? Or is this regional?
• pnathan 11y ago
  > decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. Hi Sam, I'm going to not read through 747+ comments, I'm sorry. Right now, in the best cities in the nation, the cost of living is rising significantly. These cities have a deep job pool, they are making serious efforts on sustainability, have wide and varied culture and are generally more efficient (and often better) ways to live[0]. However, because of the cost of living is rising so steeply, it is forcing people of median income and below to spread out into the suburbs, increasing commute cost (and pollution), as well as the variety of issues suburbia causes for the environment and sustaininable living[1]. Among the contributing factors here is childrearing, which takes extra space - space which is extremely expensive to rent or purchase in a city. This is an incredibly significant issue as we iterate this game several times. I'd like to bring to your attention several interlinked aspects that play out here: - higher housing density is more sustainable - highly effective transit networks decrease pollution - dense housing suitable for long-term family residences is very hard to find. I'm not persuaded that a start-up (a rapidly growing, high growth company) will be able to achieve success in these areas, because of the time horizon needed for these problems to be dealt with is on the 20+ year timespan. However, I'll argue that a company could make a dent in several of these areas: - mixed use high-rises that are designed for families: offices, schools, playgrounds, etc included[2]. This would be a shift from the typical luxury condo build and, I'd argue, would find a very solid niche in the modern urbanist movement. I would argue that an affordability policy could go hand in hand with this, with certain entities eating some of the rental/purchase cost of these properties. - Increase transit effectiveness. YC is already making a play in this area with Remix[3], but I think that doubling down on making transit costs and benefits more effective could really be a game changer. Demonstrating the very real cost of commuting would assist in the people inclined towards Green thought; figuring out how to make transit a pleasant experience would assist in getting the people not inclined to deal with the occasional horror story to support and vote for transit. - In the same vein, platforms and tools that directly support pleasant densification will help. An example of this for someone in a dense neighborhood is Walc[4]. But, looking at policy and assisting policy becomes a major political play here. Ultimately, what I fear the actual solution will look like here a broad-based housing price/rent control system, where everyone who isn't a multimillionaire who wants to live in a city has to be in a rent-controlled system, paid out by the local government. What we're seeing in Seattle is a bit of a tulip situation: people buying are buying at high prices because the sellers are aware they can sell at high prices, this ratchets the next unit price up; the demand is so high that it's forcing prices up very fast. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht... [1] http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/26/second-life-cycle-blues http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/26/second-life-cyc... [2] An arcology, yes. :-) [3] http://getremix.com/ http://getremix.com/ [4] http://www.walc.me/ http://www.walc.me/
• bcheung 11y ago
  As technology improves it is going to raise the talent bar required to be employable. Eventually it won't make sense to hire 50% of the population. A solution will be needed. If housing, education, food, and energy were made super cheap through technology we could provide those services instead of a basic income. Given plentiful resources what stops us from multiplying until we consume all available resources. Perhaps, if we had basic income it should only be provided once people turn 18. That way parents wouldn't keep having kids in order to get more money. Housing: Looking to Buckminster Fuller. He wanted to have houses assembled from modular components that could be shipped. Standardization of parts would make things cheap. Food: Robotics and biotechnology can increase yields and bring down costs. Also, aquaponics is an extremely productive system. It uses 5% of the way that traditional agriculture uses and fish consume only 1/10th the feed that cattle do. Also, duckweed (it grows like a weed) is easy to grow and feed the fish. Education: Stop with the college model already. Technology is the answer. Look at Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, etc. For education that needs more hands on training bring back the apprenticeship model. Let them get their education / training for free in exchange for working for free in the field for a limited time. Infrastructure: Public transportation needs to be a priority. Cars sit idle 95% of the time. Once we have self-driving cars they should be pooled. Just schedule a time to be picked up. For basic income, we might want to only provide it for people age 18+. Otherwise parents will just have tons of kids in order to collect checks. That will lead to overpopulation and eventually consuming all available resources.
• bcheung 11y ago
  Thomas Paine wrote an excellent essay on this concept back in the day. It is worth reading: https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html You might want to look into Georgism and Geolibertarianism as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism The basic premise of all these is that land and natural resources can not be owned. If you want to use them you have to rent / buy rights to them. That rent goes into a basic fund that is then used for basic income. The basic argument is that land belongs to everyone, so everyone should get an equal share of the rent from the land.
  • jqm 11y ago
    I believe that is the solution to the problem and I'm not sure why others don't see it. Stop taxing labor. It's counterproductive. Tax what really does belong to everyone... the land and raw materials. This approach (in addition to more morally just in my estimation) would have the added benefit of built in environmentalism. There would be a financial incentive to do more with less, to conserve and to recycle.
    • usrusr 11y ago
      I certainly see why the idea of putting the whole tax burden on land and raw materials could be appealing to people who are making software. It's difficult to make a compelling argument for change when one is so clearly on the winning side of it (which I dare to assume, given the HN demographic).
      • jqm 11y ago
        Agreed on benefit to the group. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't also be a vast improvement for society in general. Because one stands to gain from an idea doesn't in and of itself make the idea a bad one.
• bufordtwain 11y ago
  * Provide help/advice for people making big financial decisions. For example, help them when buying/renting a house, buying a car or dealing with an expensive repair. Help students with career counseling and college decisions with an eye towards their future finances. Point out less expensive options and hacks (e.g. community college for 2 years, then transfer...consider not going to college until they are more certain what they want to do...). The startup could charge a fixed fee for advice (or maybe have a subscription model for advice at any time, a bit like Angie's list).
• nathan_f77 11y ago
  Damn, there goes another one of my "what I'm going to do after I make a lot money" ideas. I really wanted to run a study like this, especially after hearing about GiveDirectly and seeing their research. In fact, that's what GiveDirectly is already doing, at least in Kenya and Uganda. But yeah, it would be really interesting to see what would happen in the US, or another developed country.
• djschnei 11y ago
  I think a negative income tax is the only sane way to approach this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
• davemel37 11y ago
  Probably the best way to decrease the cost of living is to balance information asymmetry so that buyers know everything that sellers know when transacting. Price comparison and fighting predatory businesses is a start, but too much commerce revolves are arbitrage and exploiting the vulnerability of being uninformed. Balance out the knowledge gap and consumers will be able to transact directly with producers, bringing down costs across the board.
• whybroke 11y ago
  I would add to the article's list of reasons why minimum income is a good idea the very Roman purpose behind public aid: to prevent civil unrest. And I'd second sama's mention of controlling cost of living. In addition to universally obvious importance of it, with minimum income there is the added possibility that prices for low end necessities could rise commensurate with the size of the minimum guaranteed income. A third point I'd raise is to ask about medical costs which, unlike Finland or Canada, if this test is carried out in the US, would be a very significant factor. If the minimum income needs to cover this too then healthy, and generally the young may tend to have vastly more disposable income while an unexpected illness for anyone could far exceed anything the minimum income could hope to cover.
• matchagaucho 11y ago
  Abraham Maslow addressed the psychology of basic needs in the 1940's. http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away. Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
  • heckerboy 11y ago
    >Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs Why not just eliminate that in the first place and proceed directly to the "more enriching needs"?
    • matchagaucho 11y ago
      The brain is a muscle. And much like physical muscles, there are consequences for inducing artificial growth. Time and again these experiments only prove that for 6-12 months the subjects are euphoric, creative, motivated... until they require the next level of enrichment, which they don't know how to achieve, because they've skipped "level 1" in the game of life.
  • eevilspock 11y ago
    I totally agree. Children born into wealth and privilege are completely hobbled by the lack of this fear drive. We should institute 100% inheritance tax, and all children, rich or poor, should be taken away from their parents and raised in orphanages with only enough funds to keep them from outright starving or freezing to death.
    • matchagaucho 11y ago
      Family wealth is typically lost within 3 generations. As the saying goes: “When a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with the experience winds up with the money and the person with the money winds up with the experience”.
  • rorykoehler 11y ago
• logn 11y ago
  Increase prosperity by creating a K-12, open source homeschooling curriculum and application.
• shams93 11y ago
  Ultimately the fact we neex to talk about this issue is a sign of just how much progress we've made. We're on the cusp either of ww3 and or technofacism or a new age where most people spend their time in the arts or pure sciences all those "dont quit your day job" dreams have a chance oglf coming true.
• seanabrahams 11y ago
  I am shocked there's no mention of Star Trek in this discussion. And I shall remedy it! " Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don't get paid? Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. Actually, we're all like yourself and Dr. Cochrane. " sama asks, "What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" It's a good question. I think one answer that is not limited to startups, but applies to everyone, is to spread the idea and ideals that embody an egalitarian, post-scarcity, society. Star Trek happens to be an entertaining depiction. It doesn't have much in the way of details when it comes down to it, but it embodies the ideas and values of an egalitarian, post-scarctiy, existence where people don't just sit around all day playing video games, but work to better themselves and the rest of humanity. Giving people money isn't enough. We need to also promote and live a set of values that will compliment Basic Income. We need to free ourselves from the fear of survival, but we must have the proper mindset and environment to ensure a successful freedom. So, startups, invent replicators[1] so we can move to a post-scarcity economy and everyone, spread the word that it's time for our society to evolve so we can garner the support required for instituting Basic Income. I completely agree with sama when he says, "I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale." Thus this experiment is less about whether Basic Income is a good idea, and more about how to ensure that it is a good idea and implemented successfully. I think you really need to pay attention to perceptions and societal values which requires education (plenty of startup activity here). 1. Spread the word 2. Invent replicators [2] 3. Get the messaging, education, values, mental models, etc right [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek) [2] Half joking, but serious. [3] I'll try to update this comment as thinking clarifies as this topic is so large it's overwhelming. [4] My other comment about Basic Income hopefully helping to resolve poor incentives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985443
  • eaandkw 11y ago
    I have read a few economic thoughts about Star Trek and something called Paracon or "Participatory Economics" was economic theories that happened in a "post scarcity economic" world. That would imply your replicators and such. With 3d printing and robotic displacing a lot of jobs that would be something to consider.
• joeclark77 11y ago
  My first thought about this is that, if I had a guaranteed "floor", I wouldn't have to live in a big city but could move my family to a cabin in the woods. Perhaps what YC should experiment with is something like a new Homestead Act: you'll get an economic foundation to stand on, but only if you're willing to work the land, so to speak: you have to do something with it, whether that be starting a company, writing, farming, or something else creative. I don't have any research published in a related field, but I'm tempted to send in a proposal. Would the researcher have to live in San Francisco for this?
• cs702 11y ago
  "We’re looking for one researcher who wants to work full-time on this project for 5 years as part of YC Research. We’d like someone with some experience doing this kind of research, but as always we’re more interested in someone’s potential than his or her past. Our idea is to give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period, though we’re flexible on that and all aspects of the project—we are far from experts on this kind of research. We’d be especially interested in a combination of selecting people at random, and selecting people who are driven and talented but come from poor backgrounds. We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed." This is beyond awesome: an effort truly to explore this with an open mind, measuring whether and how it might work in the real world, and doing it in a no-nonsense, zero-pretense way. Kudos to YC and kudos to Sam Altman.
• dschiptsov 11y ago
  There is nothing much to research, because the concept contradicts to the most basic principles of ecology, economics and sociology. The first principle is that a population always outgrows its resources. As long as one create conditions to sustain a life it will start to reproduce exponentially. Rabits in Australia is a classic example. The second principle is the scarcity principle of economics. Everything which is easily available loses its value by definition. Any amount of free money would be factored out by increasing of the prices, as if you move the zero on a scale. The third principle is of social hierarchy. Each society forms a hierarchy to be sustainable. It is so fundamental, that we never think of it, but there is no flat societies even in animal kingdom. Again, basic income is just moving a zero on a scale. Prostitutes will not switch to living on that income, they will merely rise the prices, because prostitution is social phenomena much more than economical. The food market will adapt accordingly, so the only food one would be able to buy will be a synthetic crap made out of cheapest substitutes - this is how markets work. Same would happen with housing. Land is a scarse asset and the most ancient status item and a source of income. Free money will change nothing there. And, of course, there were lots of experiments since the beginning of time - all these socialist or communist utopias which failed the reality checks - they crashed and sunk down after a collision with economical and social laws, which are as unalterable as the laws of physics. Simple models doesn't work. There is no other way of sustainable ecosystem exept self-regulation due to competition over scarcity of resources. It is very naive and dangerous assumption that human intelligence could beat laws of the Universe or evolutionary forces. The mess we are in is the best evidence.
  • thomasfromcdnjs 11y ago
    This shouldn't be down-voted, quite reasonable and makes sense. Mostly, moving a zero on a scale.
    • ketzu 11y ago
      The parent comment claims simple modles wont work based on simple models. The "moving 0 on a scale" argument is brought into play with minimum wage (for example 2:[1]) but it most likely wont happen. There are other points completely ignored by the parent post like welfare already in place (shouldnt this cause the same effect?), dimishing effects, etc etc. The parent comment cites nothing and mixes basic income with "thats basically communism and communism has obviously failed". I think there are reasons to downvote the parent comment, even though my comment does not provide much better quality. [1] http://www.salon.com/2015/08/04/the_7_most_dangerous_myths_about_the_fight_for_a_15_minimum_wage_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2015/08/04/the_7_most_dangerous_myths_a...
• djoshea 11y ago
  Definitely think it would be interesting to see YC Research's take on economics research, but I'm left wondering, why would someone want to take this position? As opposed to, say, entering an economics PhD program and studying the problem there. To be clear, I don't mean to spark an academia-vs-industry (or whatever YC research would be categorized as) battle. I don't know the field of econ research well and my prior would be that more perspectives and approaches to the issue would be helpful in studying the problem. What I'm interested in what would someone personally want out of doing this research but without the support of collaborators in a more formally collegial academic setting or the reputation and pull of an established think tank. To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that taking this position is a bad idea, I'm just trying to better understand the opportunity and why YC research might be a better decision than a more run-of-the-mill PhD. I'm ever so slightly skeptical, but mostly just curious.
• irishcoffee 11y ago
  So, I'm sure this will get buried, but in the hopeful event of responses: How does this prevent people from spending up to their means? People who make 20k, spend to their means. People who make 50k, spend to their means. People who make 100k, spend to their means. People who make 452k, spend to their means. This is a sincere, non-snark question: people spend to their means. It's similar to packing a bag, a person has a tendency to fill the bag, regardless to if they need all the things they put into it. I'll dig up sources, but people who make 452k a year, they'll tell you they're not rich. They don't feel rich. This. How is this resolved? Everyone wants a vacation to an island every year, and the best things for their kids, the best food on the table, the best cable channels. How is this fixed? For example (and for the record, I hold these people in the highest regard) how do we replace trashmen, postal workers, the guy who pumps my sewage, that dunkin donuts worker? The guy who cuts lawns, or sells firewood? Basic income, in my opinion, is a good idea. People living without the stress of of worrying about paying rent, I really like that idea. I have siblings, and their life is upside-down because they can't pay the bills and keep food on the table (I help as much as I can) how do we fix that? Would my brother just get a nicer apartment, and eat nicer food, and still be broke? He is a welder by trade, and makes a living. Paycheck-to-paycheck, but he makes it work. If he had an extra 15k a year, I am fully confident, he would still be living paycheck-to-paycheck. He is my brother and I love him, this is his reality. How do we fix that?
  • jessriedel 11y ago
    I don't endorse this by any means, but you may be interested in the work of Cornell Economist Robert Frank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Frank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Frank
  • ddod 11y ago
    UBI isn't supposed to fix the problem of money mismanagement. If everyone was spending up to their means, that would be a success because the economy would be flourishing. If they were putting that money into savings, the experiment would be a failure. UBI is designed to solve for the future economy where human labor's value diminishes. In 20 years your brother's welding job may still be paying but whatever job you (or your children) do on a computer will likely be much better handled by AI. UBI is to bail you (and most of our economy) out, not necessarily your brother.
• obrero 11y ago
  A startup is a corporation with angels and VCs (who raise money from LPs). Over time, the larger startups go on NASDAQ or the NYSE, and then after time issue dividends. They expropriate the surplus labor time from the people who work and create the wealth of their company. A corporation is a tool by one class to exploit and expropriate from another class, so asking how a startup/corporation can help workers is contradictory. The way to help workers is to abolish corporations and capitalism. With the rise of capitalism came into existence a new category - unemployment. The major US business magazines worry about unemployment - when it gets too low ( http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_44/b3653163.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_44/b3653163.htm ). Too many people who want work having work is seen as the problem. Why? Because a reserve army of labor is needed as a cudgel against those who are employed. People don't need to be convinced of this. We can see what is happening as China has taken the capitalist road, in Greece, in Spain. The fed funds rate went from next to nothing to 0.25% and the US stock market began tanking - after years and years of free money. As Marx said, capitalism is like every economic system before it - a self-destructive one. In some months, or some years, all the starry-eyed 20 somethings in San Francisco will be facing what the starry eyed 20 year olds of 2000-2001 went through - layoffs and no work. The lucky ones will land some shit job for less pay. I supposed if you have a doctorate in machine learning from MIT and are working at Google or Facebook you might not notice this happening, but everyone else will. "The angel market is drying up because the stock market went down and people have less money". See and hear children. Learn. We don't have to convince people of this. The people controlling the capital will botch it up, the economy will tank more, and everyone will be told to "tighten their belts" except the type of people Graham writes hosannas for in his odes to wealth inequality. Some fools will lick the boot kicking them, but not all will and we go from there. Feudalism lasted maybe 1000 years, capitalism has been around in a real sense for maybe half that time, but many think it is more unstable than feudalism and will keel over faster.
• shykes 11y ago
  If I weren't busy doing Docker, I would be doing this. In fact given enough time and resources, I'm confident I will eventually find a way to leverage Docker to advance the goal of universal income somehow :) Figuring out basic income is perhaps the most important thing we could do as a society, because it will unlock the energy and creativity we're lacking to solve every other important problem. Trying to solve global warming, energy, crime or government without basic income is like running a marathon on one leg.
• bglazer 11y ago
  Both in regards to decreasing the cost of living and also increasing prosperity for everyone, the clearest answer to me is to purposefully and meaningfully increase investment in areas outside of San Francisco. The Valley, through a variety of circumstances, is now home to the highest concentration of technology companies, and is unsurprisingly one of the most expensive places to live in the world. The are known economic forces [1] that cause clustering of similar firms in small areas, and there's no doubt that this is a net positive for both the city and the individual businesses, at least at first. The incredible concentration both of talent and wealth in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a clear testament to the power of physical proximity. However, I urge the technology community and specifically Y Combinator to seriously reconsider the notion that all of technology must happen on a peninsula in central California. How this decreases the cost of living is obvious. I live in Memphis TN and I pay $500 a month on my mortgage. Further, the city of Memphis and many other cities in the US are in serious need of both talented young people and economic development. The "brain drain" is a real and devastating effect of compressing the technology ecosystem onto the West Coast. Reversing the brain drain would bring leadership, talent, and dollars to areas that need it. I'd like to specifically call out YC for this section of their FAQ: > Can we do it without moving to where you are? > Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. In every other aspect of their model, YC is open to all reasonable possibilities. They fund photo sharing apps and nuclear reactors, women and men, young and old, but NOT people who won't move to SF. This reasoning is apparently based on just a few examples. Thus, the idea that constant physical availability is a fundamentally important part funding is just conjecture. This policy and the attitude behind it are essentially opposed to the ethos of the technologist. How does one change the world by adding incrementally to the wealth of the Bay Area? Also, it's an absurdity that I have to mention that the internet was invented so that we wouldn't have to do stuff like this anymore. This also addresses the issue of diversity. If you want more diverse people, go to where they live. I find it an amusing contradiction that many of the people who cringe at the idea of moving to the repressive "Deep South" of Tennessee would find themselves working with people who aren't white dudes for the the first time if they ever did move. So, I urge YC and the tech community at large to spread out from just the bay area. Reconsider the cities you came from. Be bold and try to find the opportunities that are waiting outside Silicon Valley. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster
• analog31 11y ago
  It occurs to me that we could also turn the question around: What could increased prosperity for everyone do for startups? Some thoughts: 1. Financial risk is an element of prosperity. Lowering risk by improving public services and the safety net embolden more people to pursue a startup. I would spend more money if I didn't have to hoard every penny against the risk of a health crisis or period of unemployment. 2. Prosperity is the source of demand for products and services. 3. Broad based consumer demand can support infrastructure which, in turn, supports startups. An example that I can think of is the cell phone system, which really took off when "everybody" could afford a cell phone.
• ph0rque 11y ago
  Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? I've actually been thinking about that for quite some time now. Here's what I think will help increase prosperity: * Inexpensive housing: something like the Tiny House movement, but more mainstream and less expensive. * Automated food production, such as my side project, AutoMicroFarm. * Inexpensive electric transportation. * Universal health insurance. The above four items would enable anyone to have the vast majority of their needs met. I plan to expand on the above in a blog post.
• Tycho 11y ago
  Today I was thinking about the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing. That's his theory from the book Outliers (which I haven't read) which argues that to become a true expert in something requires 10,000 hours of practice. Now, say I wanted to become an expert in programming. To the point where I was an elite 10x developer. If I quit my job and lived off my savings, I could conceivably work on programming 100 hours per week. So after ten weeks I'd have 1000 hours, and after 100 weeks I'd have my 10,000. So that's two years or so at a minumum. But living off savings for two years would be incredibly costly. Working full time would let me squeeze in say 20 hours a week, so I'd now take 10 years to reach the golden 10,000 hours or experience. If I cut down to a part time job, it would take 20 years. I think the latter two are unrealistic because they take so long. The 100 hour per week option is more of a possibility. With universal basic income, everyone would have the opportunity. If lots of people pulled it off, the productivity gains for society would be enormous. Obviously there's lots of people in society who have this sort of spare time and simply do not use it. However I think there's an argument that the people most likely to achieve this 10,000 hours goal are people who are gainfully employed and wouldn't pursue it without some sort of income support.
  • adg 11y ago
    A lot of people think Gladwell created the 10,000 hours theory, but he merely popularized it. The original research comes from K. Anders Ericsson. Here's a link to the original paper, which is actually quite accessible, if you're interested: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...
• nl 11y ago
  There are many good suggestions around how to increase prosperity so far. Could I make point related to the proposal? In order for it to be accepted, I think it would be very useful if people could understand the modelling. Obviously this is difficult because economic modelling is pretty hard. However, a good first step would be to make the model open - and preferably hosted on some kind of notebook-style platform so anyone can change the assumptions are try it. I'd note that the Fed Reserve's economic models are open[1][2] and frequently updated, so there is some precedent for this. [1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/frbus/us-models-package.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/frbus/us-models-pa... [2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2005/835/revision/ifdp835r.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2005/835/revision/if...
• jecjec 11y ago
  Can I please stop seeing shit about poor people on Hacker News? I really do not care.
• caretStick 11y ago
  Tax net worth
• maxharris 11y ago
  Are you prepared for your researcher(s) to conclude that a "basic income" is a bad idea? Or is this idea part of your ideology, and no amount of looking at the world will convince you otherwise?
• JabavuAdams 11y ago
  Question: Why is work a good thing? Much of the work that gets done is all heat and no light. It's really interesting to read this discussion and get a sense of how deeply the work-ethic is ingrained. Many commenters can't seem to imagine that people would do anything productive if they're not paid to do it. Is this really what you believe?
• narrator 11y ago
  Just a brainstorm, not even sure if this is a great idea: Perhaps a good thing to do with a universal basic income is tell people they can collect it from anywhere. This is what people do with social security and such. They go live in cheap countries where they can get dental and medical work done for 1/10th the price. Cheap food, cheap rent, etc. The lowered demand for these things in the US would lower prices here. Everybody wins!
  • namenotrequired 11y ago
    Except the people in the cheap countries who see their prizes rise because of the influx of relatively richer people.
• ordbajsare 11y ago
  Sorry I will not support you while you smoke weed, play video games and masturbate for an living.
• nvision 11y ago
  Fascinating topic. I can see why it is popular. 1. basic income implies that there is a fixed minimum cost for comfortable survival. Does it require organic food? Does it require clean air? Does it require etiquette training? Does it adjust for localized prices? Does it include a vehicle, video games, and gadgets? 2. a simple analogy to zoo kept animals comes to mind. The more detached from the holistic view of nature and the cosmos humans get, the worse off we become. Why? because everything IS connected. 3. Money is a flawed system because you are equating material goods to non-material concepts. It will never balance out. Not even with gold.
• deepGem 11y ago
  One area that can be improved by startups without the need for enormous entitlement spending is food. I don't mean the radical notion of liquid food or pill popping (though that day might arrive sooner than later) or even manufactured food. I'm talking about employing simple robotics to reduce the cost of farm labor. Tasks such as cutting the paddy crop. All these years, plants have been engineered to suit the machines and that has reduced farming costs. However, these machines are expensive and work only on very large farms. If we engineer machines to suit the plants growth, we can achieve a dramatic cut in costs as these machines or robots won't need scale. By scale, I mean you won't need a 100 acre farm to use one. Even a small farmer can rent a robot to maintain his 2 acre farm and produce food at a very low cost. Couple this with the dramatic reduction in transport which will be brought about by electric and self driving trucks - we are looking at food that will cost next to nothing in the next 20-30 years.
• hyperpallium 11y ago
  Ennui, once the province of past aristocracy and present trust-fund babies, will be accessible to all! Survival is the natural meaning-giver. You need bread AND circuses. TV, movies, reddit and video games are the modern circuses, but we need to make MEANING accessible. Startups, with lowering barriers, are part answer. But not winner-take-all unicorns; more like long-tail lifestyle businesses. So that everyone can be uniquely useful, regardless of direction or ability (Ricardo's comparative advantage).
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• hackercomplex 11y ago
  >Do people, without the fear of not being able to eat, accomplish far more and benefit society far more? Why not basic commodities ? I mean distributing significant quantities of corn, corn-meal, flour, rice, a wide variety of beans, dried fruit, beets, onion, millet, granulated garlic, etc. The stuff that you can make a vast array of healthy foods out of. This eliminates much of the possability of waste in the system, and at the same time it doesn't expose the individual to legal and privacy complications that come with 'income'. It translates into money in people's pockets indirectly because now their family's food budget is dramatically reduced. I think this is a more elegant solution but the reason why it's difficult politically is because it incentivizes individuals and families to put more time and planning into home food preparation. There are billion dollar advertising campaigns aimed at conditioning the exact opposite behavior which is one reason why it's probably politically untenable at this time. Also I'd like to raise another point which is that I find it somewhat disturbing that a major startup community leadership organization is so interested in possibly attempting to influence the national policy around financial issues in a way that is so far removed from the technology domain. Are you guys a startup incubator or a think tank ? In other words are you busy conducting research to churn out position papers designed to influence the national debate on non-tech issues ? If so then how transparent do you plan on being with founders, past, present, and future about this entire process as it evolves going forward ? The reason why I believe it's a bit of a stretch to consider this a tech issue is because in my view the idea that "technology is eliminating jobs" seems to be a false premise statistically speaking. To me it's a debate centered around how "free trade policy" is influencing the global job market and how that has impacted the United States economy. I believe that in the US at least the tech ecosystem has created more jobs, a whole new economy in fact which didn't exist before. It's the non-tech jobs that are gone, but they weren't eliminated by technological innovation as much as they were dispursed globally in the wake of certain regulations.
• dbroockman 11y ago
  What's funny is the best study would involve picking some people at random and giving them a basic income -- something YC could easily do. Theory can only get you so far on this one (although would be necessary to interpret the results of an empirical study).
• DocFeind 11y ago
  I would very much like to help with this. Is there a way to contact someone beyond the application? There is no way to provide what I can show in that fashion, but speaking could glean a tale most would find impossible. It's a safe bet I can provide a perspective from more angles into the concept than most if not nearly all. Be it as the researcher, or an advisor in the truth of the real American demographics, that have next to no chance at success. Few topics ignite a passion in me as much as those surrounding this. Other than the lifestyle truly rich, I have lived the life of the rest. From barrios then ghettos, homelessness to youth prison, day laborer to small business then tech startup success... In literally every corner of the nation as most every caste... With only an 8th grade education to begin with, a dash of 90s electronics tech school, and self taught for all the rest. I want to help, just let me know how to explain why, away from public eyes. I make this request, to tell the not for public knowledge story of the rest. Then leave it for you, to allow us, to figure out where to go next.
• dmichulke 11y ago
  There will be a big questions to answer: Will the basic income be paid in addition to standard gov't subsidies? If yes, how do you make up for the shortfall of money? "Taxing the rich" is nice in theory but IMHO it doesn't work right now, what are you going to do to change that? If no, it might be worth it, if you also fire the bureaucrats currently working on gov't subsidies (freeing up the money thereby) But I don't see how your study will account for this, nor do I think this is feasible because gov't tends to increase in size and has no incentive to decrease. Other beneificial aspects would be decreasing the size of the code of law and forcing "social security lawyers" to specialize in something else, reducing costs of all other lawyers. Again, it will be hard to put it in practice and difficult to account for in your study. I suppose you also have already read some literature on the topic. From my personal viewpoint I'd recommend "Economics in one Lesson" by Hazlitt [0], it's decidedly non-mainstream and I wonder if it's taught at all in universities today but the only economic theory based on game theory (although not explicitly) and fully consistent IMHO. I also believe that funding a multi-agent simulation is probably cheaper for a few economic models (I'd volunteer here) Finally, I see some business value here, namely studying whether it would make sense to fund persons instead of start-ups, as e.g. Entrepreneur First does [1] (I have no affiliation) [0] http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf [1] http://www.joinef.com/ http://www.joinef.com/
• kriro 11y ago
  Some thoughts that are not related to the topic of research but rather the program: - I love the idea of YC sponsoring research. - Some more information about the program itself would be helpful. 5 years is long for a research program. What does this cover? Income for the researcher, other costs, are they required to live in SV or maybe somewhere else? - Where are the sponsored basic income people supposed to live/how will they be selected? Any plans for this already? - (!) Important: Please make it a requirement for the research to be as open as possible. Require datasets to be made available and all publications to be made available online (if journals/conferences make sure they have Open Access). Also make the research process as open as possible. - Consider making the application process as open as possible, too. Publish the materials/proposal that was submitted by the "winner". Possibly publish unsuccessful applications with some comments as well. I know that this isn't going to be a high priority but there's a distinct lack of feedback for unsuccessful grant proposals in science.
• DoubleExpat 11y ago
  Basic income exists already in several European countries. For example in Germany you get for half a year after loosing a job about 75% of your last salary. After six months it degrades but you will always be supplied with a home, food, cloths and some little money to spend. In France you get paid for two years after loosing your job. In Denmark I think it is three or four year even. Enough time to start three or four startups. Would be interesting to look into the data of these countries.
  • tajen 11y ago
    In France, 2 years at 80% of your original salary (unemployment benefits). AND after that, you get the basic income ("RSA" +APL) of 650€/month (which is 60% of minimum salary, or 40% of median income). The amount varies depending on your housing situation and city. Source: I was on RSA for a year when I created my startup.
• studentrob 11y ago
  > Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy and fulfilled? The answer to this question is influenced by so many environmental factors that it would be difficult to do one study and arrive at a repeatable answer. Communities, countries, cultures, weather, and so many other things are at play. We already know that education and training produce self sufficient people. If startups want to to give back, they should start with something they know and incorporate more training programs into the workplace. Develop growth cycles, from beginner to professional, and build a culture of renewal and community that makes people want to stick around.
• eaandkw 11y ago
  From an economic point of view. How would you provide Basic income for everyone while at the same time eliminating the "wage price spiral" effect of normal goods such as milk and bread. I am not an economist but I would be curious. Another point would be who gets to decide what a basic income is. Why stop at basic income. One thing that always troubles me able minimal wage discussions is why start minimum wage as say $15 dollars an hour. Why not $100. I actually believe that if we eliminated the minimum wage altogether the wages for various jobs would be able to find a better equilibrium then setting a artificial minimum. The argument the employers would reduce wages to $0.50 and the like would not happen because everyone would quit.
• amedstudent1 11y ago
  >Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Surely I'm not the only one offended by this? Lost respect after reading this.
• lagudragu 11y ago
  Let's play the devil's advocate here; the problem isn't that the current system needs to be replaced, the problem is that the current system has become overcomplicated and open to a lot of abuse. Basic income will not be the solution on this system, it will just replace it with a "clean slate" dragging a lot of questions. How will the Basic income be regulated? If Basic Income will be implemented, how will the current market evolve around it? Will the amount of Basic Income be the same over all participating members (countries, states, ...)? How will Basic Income react to strong market fluctuations? Etc. A lot of jobs will be lost in the future due to technological advances (as new jobs will be created as well) and Basic Income is a noble approach to replace an imperfect system and prepare the population for these changes. But for the far future I'm not convinced it won't be prone for the same difficulties and (corrupt) influences the current system has endured.
• brightball 11y ago
  Would that work? Part of a basic income is the knowledge that it's guaranteed to be there. I'm not entirely certain that you can do a short term test for it.
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• prirun 11y ago
  Instead of giving everyone free money, we should work on stopping currency devaluation. It's a bigger problem that affects us all, but the poor much more than the rich.
• erik998 11y ago
  The best studies and books I have seen on Basic Income come from Guy Standing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_%28economist%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_%28economist%29 "The Precariat" has some great ideas on how the relationship between the state and individual are changing. He also covers the current dynamics in welfare assistance for citizens of a state and demonstrates how basic income would be easier to administer and lessen the burden if proof needed to gain assistance. I also like how he examine s the current status of citizen vs non citizen and proposes the notion of a "denizen." If you are an a contract programmer I recommend reading "The Precariat." All the extra work you do for work should count for something but it is sometimes not given any recognition. Watch the youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OraivQ45ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OraivQ45ME Standing, Guy; Jhabvala, Renana; Unni, Jeemol; Rani, Uma (2010). Social income and insecurity: a study in Gujarat. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415585743. Standing, Guy (2011). The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781849664554. Standing, Guy (2014). A Precariat Charter: from denizens to citizens. London New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781472510396.
• tshannon 11y ago
  This will probably never be seen, but one of the best things I think we can do to lower the cost of living as well as help get people into paying jobs is localize the economy more. Make it more efficient to buy food from the local farmer / farmers market than having it shipped around the world to the nearest walmart. Make it easier to do local and smaller scale manufacturing (think 3d printing). When your economy is local, it's efficient, green (remove the high cost of transportation out of the equation) and it feeds on itself with jobs and money. I'm building something right now that I hope will be a step towards reaching some of those goals.
• jhallenworld 11y ago
  Start a micro-investment company that allows people to invest in others to live and better themselves for some kind of cut of their future income. Do this at a huge scale. The problem with basic income is where does the money come from? It's either loaned, taxed or invested. Loans are bad because you are enslaving the borrower. Taxes are bad because you are stealing work/labor from the taxed. Investments are best: you probably won't make your money back, but the possibility could provide incentive to give. On the recipients side: perhaps there is value for them to promote themselves (in a Kickstarter kind of way) for more investments. Just the exercise might give them ideas of how to increase their own value. Have the fed become the basic investor. This means inflating the money supply, but somewhat curtailed because successful investments have some payback. This is perhaps the fairest tax-like money source- it really hurts those with large amount of parked cash the most, which may not be such a bad thing. It encourages them to do something better with their money.
• SkyMarshal 11y ago
  >Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? A general theme here is to identify every element of our current economy and society that we use debt to access, and find ways of disrupting that, of providing same or equivalent access without debt. Shelter, transportation, health, and education are all ripe for that kind of disruption.
• MaricopaArizona 11y ago
  (Cross-posted from a similar thread) Has anybody studied the outcomes on American Indian reservations from having basic income guaranteed for generations? I'm not an expert or well-read in this field, but I think anybody advocating basic income would be interested to visit a reservation and observe the lifestyles, dreams, goals, and successes found there.
• melbourne_mat 11y ago
  +1000 for Sam Altman I always thought rich guys - particularly American ones - are just a bunch of selfish assholes. I'm heartened to see that there is at least one - Sam Altman - who thinks about those outside his social circle.
• dbpokorny 11y ago
  I was under the impression that the problem was a corrupt and impenetrable legal system built to erect barriers to entry and protect insiders, the virtue in whose hearts is boiled away in the fires of greed and lust for power. This is a sort of French Revolution type system: the elites can keep shitting and pissing until suddenly a conspiracy forms and KABOOM a whole bunch of dead rich people in the street and NOBODY CARES because they're perverted scum ! ! ! B R I N G B A C K T H E G U I L L O T I N E
• dkraft 11y ago
  y'all are just using big words to express income redistribution. which. doesn't. work. simply take the extreme case where everyone gets free resources. it is unsustainable. natural selection is sustainable. that's how we got here. anything else is just a deferment of the inevitable.
  • sspiff 11y ago
    I think this is an oversimplifying view of reality. Taking the most extreme case (free everything) and pointing out it's impossible (without referencing a single data point of evidence no less) is pointless. Basic income is not about people not having to work for a living, it's a proposed restructuring of the social security that many nation states already have in place. That is, a simple basic income formula replacing complex and hard/expensive to police support formulas for the sick, elderly and/or unemployed. One of the leading arguments for these experiments is how they allow governments to downsize their workforce, thus lowering the cost for the taxpaying segment society. As far as I know, early real world experiments are just now being spun up (in the Netherlands and Finland, for example), and so far all we have is simulation and theories from economists. That's not enough data to rule out the entire model. You are of course welcome to have your own opinion and gut feeling about the matter, but until someone proves your point, I remain unconvinced.
• oneJob 11y ago
  Compare the U.S. Constitution (7,200 words) to the E.U. Constitution (76,000 words). Many comments are focusing on the mechanics and details. That approach leads down the road to 76,000 words. The goal is a macro issue, not a micro issue. Committing to a basic income is something that should be done for the same reasons we go to war or go to the moon. Not because it is easy or profitable but because it is what we want to do and believe we have a moral imperative to do. A basic income does not require that everyone become industrious. Nor does it guarantee national economic superiority. It is simply, and profoundly, a commitment to ensuring that every individual shares in the economic wealth generated by our society. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/comparing-us-eu-constitutions http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/comparing-us-eu-...
• jliptzin 11y ago
  Online voting needs to happen first before we have a chance of implementing a basic income in the US. The right wing just does not believe in science or the results of research that doesn't fit their worldview, so anything that comes of this will be moot, until they lose enough power through dying off, or through much higher participation rates among younger voters (online voting).
• BjoernKW 11y ago
  Just a quick note on sama's question on reducing the cost of living. One aspect that comes to mind and I think that this is key in significantly reducing the cost of living for urban populations: Reducing or at best completely doing away with the necessity for people to travel to a place of work (both commuting and one-off business trips), i.e. solving the problem of cultural aversion to remote work that still is prevalent in most work environments, particularly - of all things - in Silicon Valley startups. Why is it that the world's brightest minds apparently still haven't solved the problem of physical location? Why do I have to be in a tremendously expensive location like San Francisco if I want to start a Silicon Valley kind of startup? Solving the problem of commuting / requirement of being at a physical location at a particular time potentially could free up so many resources for both people and companies (which wouldn't have to pay office rent in an expensive area of town anymore) that funding a basic income would be cinch.
• sbardle 11y ago
  I would investigate implementing a basic income through the creation of an alternative currency system. That is, everyone who subscribes to the system, gets a certain number of free credits equivalent to 10k a year, in exchange for certain responsibilities. I don't see how it can be done using the existing fiat currencies at the moment due to lack of political support, but if you could pilot and trial it on say Bitcoin, then you might be able to scale it at a later date when the political climate has changed and everyone understands that software is eating (or has already eaten) the world.