5 ms·

Why a bunch of Silicon Valley investors are suddenly interested in basic income

30 points by dankohn1 11y ago

sharemywin 11y ago
Now I have some context so it makes a little more sense. Is society as a whole fund-able?
- tomcam 11y ago
  I can't see how. The government has no money if its own. It depends on taxes. Currently about 47% of working citizens pay no federal income tax at all. I like the idea of basic income, but I cannot fathom where the money comes from.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    We could separate the concept of business and personal income where the basic income is taxes on business. Also, crank up efforts to eliminate tax dodges by big companies. Anyway, I did a quick multiplication of average cost of living times our population. I get $10 trillion a year. Yeah, have no idea where they'll get that from. A stipend good enough for a chunk of food or rent with a limit of one per head of household would be a fraction of that. Probably doable with U.S.'s tax revenues.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Currently about 47% of working citizens pay no federal income tax at all. That sounds a lot like the usually cited figure for the share of US households that don't pay federal income tax (which tend to have less adults per household, and a lower employment rate among those adults, than households that do pay federal taxes, so its unlikely to be much like the percentage of "working citizens" that don't pay federal income taxes.)
  - gozur88 11y ago
    I think it will work fine for about two generations. People who've developed a career will probably still work, since much of the hard work is done. And there's a cultural push toward work. But culture follows the facts on the ground. Over time the concept of a work ethic will erode away. I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take that many to break the system.
    - hwstar 11y ago
      At the end of 2 generations, people may not need to work or 50+% of them will be forced into permanent unemployment. What do you do in that case? Does the state toss democracy out the window by culling the unemployable? Does the state implement basic income to prevent such a tragedy from occurring?
      - gozur88 11y ago
        >At the end of 2 generations, people may not need to work or 50+% of them will be forced into permanent unemployment. Or maybe not. People have been predicting that for hundreds of years, and it still hasn't happened. >What do you do in that case? Does the state toss democracy out the window by culling the unemployable? Does the state implement basic income to prevent such a tragedy from occurring? The problem is UBI might cause big problems in the absence of any other problems. Certainly if labor becomes mostly worthless I'd consider it, but that's certainly not the case just yet.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take that many to break the system. If the system is constructed so that increasing defections from taxable-income-generating activity (which isn't just work -- capital income, after all, is taxed as well) decrease the real value of UBI (and, thus, the attractiveness of forgoing such activity in favor of other pursuits), then this tendency will be controlled and constrained within the ability of the productivity of the active economy to support. As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system.
      - gozur88 11y ago
        >As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system. So you might end up with a situation where people who've never held a job and have no marketable skills find, in their late twenties or thirties, that UBI is no longer enough to make ends meet. That sounds like a recipe for revolution.
dankohn1 11y ago
Vox does an excellent job on their explainers.
tomcam 11y ago
Money comes from taxpayers. What if a majority of taxpayers decide they'd rather not work?
- tomlock 11y ago
  >>The best past experiment, in the Canadian town of Dauphin in the 1970s, was considered promising because it suggested the policy didn't discourage people from working much; only teenagers and new moms (two groups who might be better off not working anyway) reported working less. Typically, both of those groups are low-income, and therefore wouldn't be contributing that much to tax anyway. Its precisely the idea that taxpayers will decide not to work which is driving these studies.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Money comes from taxpayers. Money comes from the government that issues it, actually. Government operating funds come from a variety of sources, but largely, it is true, tax payments. > What if a majority of taxpayers decide they'd rather not work? If you mean "decide not to take actions that create taxable income" (UBI -- and government in general as increasing automation eats traditional employment -- only works with ending preferential tax treatment of capital income, so that "work" and "create taxable income" become even less the same than they are currently), then either: (1) If UBI is variable in quantity based on distributing proceeds of a dedicated tax stream among the qualified recipients (i.e., the citizenry at large), then the UBI amount drops, and that decision because less attractive, leading to more of those able to earn taxable income in addition to the UBI choosing to do so; this is a self-limiting negative feedback loop. (2) If UBI is not variable, and is fixed in nominal value, the reduction in production relative to the supply of money in consumer hands caused by that decision leads to increased inflation, reducing the real value of UBI, leading to the same results as in #1. Again, a self-limiting negative feedback loop. (3) If UBI is inflation-indexed, then you have a positive feedback loop that blows up the system. So, don't do that.
  - gavazzy 11y ago
    This is a tragedy of the commons problem. If there are 100 individuals, then if one individual stops working, average UBI payout would only decrease 1%. So, a rational actor would stop working. Similarly, if 95 out of 100 stop working, then the other 5 have little incentive to work, because their income is basically funding everyone else. This is the opposite of a negative feedback loop.

30 points by dankohn1 11y ago

sharemywin 11y ago

Now I have some context so it makes a little more sense. Is society as a whole fund-able?

tomcam 11y ago
I can't see how. The government has no money if its own. It depends on taxes. Currently about 47% of working citizens pay no federal income tax at all. I like the idea of basic income, but I cannot fathom where the money comes from.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  We could separate the concept of business and personal income where the basic income is taxes on business. Also, crank up efforts to eliminate tax dodges by big companies. Anyway, I did a quick multiplication of average cost of living times our population. I get $10 trillion a year. Yeah, have no idea where they'll get that from. A stipend good enough for a chunk of food or rent with a limit of one per head of household would be a fraction of that. Probably doable with U.S.'s tax revenues.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Currently about 47% of working citizens pay no federal income tax at all. That sounds a lot like the usually cited figure for the share of US households that don't pay federal income tax (which tend to have less adults per household, and a lower employment rate among those adults, than households that do pay federal taxes, so its unlikely to be much like the percentage of "working citizens" that don't pay federal income taxes.)
- gozur88 11y ago
  I think it will work fine for about two generations. People who've developed a career will probably still work, since much of the hard work is done. And there's a cultural push toward work. But culture follows the facts on the ground. Over time the concept of a work ethic will erode away. I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take that many to break the system.
  - hwstar 11y ago
    At the end of 2 generations, people may not need to work or 50+% of them will be forced into permanent unemployment. What do you do in that case? Does the state toss democracy out the window by culling the unemployable? Does the state implement basic income to prevent such a tragedy from occurring?
    - gozur88 11y ago
      >At the end of 2 generations, people may not need to work or 50+% of them will be forced into permanent unemployment. Or maybe not. People have been predicting that for hundreds of years, and it still hasn't happened. >What do you do in that case? Does the state toss democracy out the window by culling the unemployable? Does the state implement basic income to prevent such a tragedy from occurring? The problem is UBI might cause big problems in the absence of any other problems. Certainly if labor becomes mostly worthless I'd consider it, but that's certainly not the case just yet.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take that many to break the system. If the system is constructed so that increasing defections from taxable-income-generating activity (which isn't just work -- capital income, after all, is taxed as well) decrease the real value of UBI (and, thus, the attractiveness of forgoing such activity in favor of other pursuits), then this tendency will be controlled and constrained within the ability of the productivity of the active economy to support. As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      >As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system. So you might end up with a situation where people who've never held a job and have no marketable skills find, in their late twenties or thirties, that UBI is no longer enough to make ends meet. That sounds like a recipe for revolution.

dankohn1 11y ago

Vox does an excellent job on their explainers.

tomcam 11y ago

Money comes from taxpayers. What if a majority of taxpayers decide they'd rather not work?

tomlock 11y ago
>>The best past experiment, in the Canadian town of Dauphin in the 1970s, was considered promising because it suggested the policy didn't discourage people from working much; only teenagers and new moms (two groups who might be better off not working anyway) reported working less. Typically, both of those groups are low-income, and therefore wouldn't be contributing that much to tax anyway. Its precisely the idea that taxpayers will decide not to work which is driving these studies.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Money comes from taxpayers. Money comes from the government that issues it, actually. Government operating funds come from a variety of sources, but largely, it is true, tax payments. > What if a majority of taxpayers decide they'd rather not work? If you mean "decide not to take actions that create taxable income" (UBI -- and government in general as increasing automation eats traditional employment -- only works with ending preferential tax treatment of capital income, so that "work" and "create taxable income" become even less the same than they are currently), then either: (1) If UBI is variable in quantity based on distributing proceeds of a dedicated tax stream among the qualified recipients (i.e., the citizenry at large), then the UBI amount drops, and that decision because less attractive, leading to more of those able to earn taxable income in addition to the UBI choosing to do so; this is a self-limiting negative feedback loop. (2) If UBI is not variable, and is fixed in nominal value, the reduction in production relative to the supply of money in consumer hands caused by that decision leads to increased inflation, reducing the real value of UBI, leading to the same results as in #1. Again, a self-limiting negative feedback loop. (3) If UBI is inflation-indexed, then you have a positive feedback loop that blows up the system. So, don't do that.
- gavazzy 11y ago
  This is a tragedy of the commons problem. If there are 100 individuals, then if one individual stops working, average UBI payout would only decrease 1%. So, a rational actor would stop working. Similarly, if 95 out of 100 stop working, then the other 5 have little incentive to work, because their income is basically funding everyone else. This is the opposite of a negative feedback loop.