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This is missing perhaps the most controversial part of the Universal Basic Income: that it's funded by the same population that it's helping. This isn't a fair

This is missing perhaps the most controversial part of the Universal Basic Income: that it's funded by the same population that it's helping. This isn't a fair test because it's being funded by "outside" money, from a much richer source (investors and donors from the richest country on earth). It's a charity moreso than a real investigation of Universal Basic Income. A more realistic test would be to take those 6,000 Kenyans, tax them in some way (e.g. take 2x from 3,000 people), then distribute the money equally. And it would have to be done in one localized area to take care of the homogeneity problem (if the money is too sparsely distributed, prices won't reflect the new money distribution). As much as they talk about how scientifically the study must be done, and the rigorous testing, it seems that there are some holes in the experiment.

JulianMorrison 10y ago
I would rather have a world UBI funded by world-level income and capital taxes. The richer countries owe places like Kenya big for centuries of extractive imperial policies.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  British colonization of Kenya started in the mid-19th century and ended in 1962. Before that the Arabs and Portuguese were only able to control the coasts. So "centuries of extractive imperial policies" is a bit of hyperbole. Do the Italians owe the French compensation for Julius Caesar's campaigns? This game can go on forever.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I would dearly love to see the note I signed to assume that debt. Nobody owes anybody anything for the things their great-grandparents did. Or for the things their grandparents did. Or for the things their parents did. Or for the things their siblings do. Life happens right now, not 10, 20, 50, 100, or 1000 years ago. The problem with worldwide UBI is the same as nationwide UBI. The cash is just a token to split up complicated market-clearing trades into a collection of simple half-trades. You still need the goods and services to be produced and distributed. If you take a million US dollars and give it to a Kenyan, that Kenyan would still have to send some of it right back to New York to fill up a cargo ship and send it to Nairobi, because the local markets aren't equipped to handle that ripple in the money supply. Rather than taking the money, and moving it, you have to take the productivity and move it. You would have to industrialize Kenya to the same extent as the US. You would have to pave it with the same roads, wire it with the same cables, police it with the same cops (or maybe better cops), do business with the same contract law. I think the reason Kenya is still Kenya after the colonial period is because it does not wan't to be the 51st state of the US, or another member state of the EU. And it does not yet have enough robots operating there to sustain a meaningful UBI. Worldwide UBI means worldwide industrialization and uniform business laws. You can't just screw with the money and expect it to work.
placeybordeaux 10y ago
That is what matters to you, it's not the only important way to use this concept. Charity has fucked up the world in many places many times. This is a chance to stop that.
Retric 10y ago
Poverty is localized, so you do get outside money into poor communities. Think about it like this, does Bill Gates live next to a poor person? Would Basic Income in his area tell you much about basic income in the US?
savanaly 10y ago
Most of the discussion of UBI that I've seen posits it as something to replace the social safety net. The social safety net is obviously not paid for by the people it helps (except in some small way, perhaps), so why would UBI be? True, part of the social safety net is inevitably returned to the richer portions of the population through their own share, but inevitably the net flow is towards the poorer population.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  The social safety net is eventually paid for by the people it helps through inflation of the prices of basic goods and services.
  - savanaly 10y ago
    Perhaps partially. But their real income can be inferred from how many goods they consume, and I don't think anyone would dispute they get to consume more goods in the short and long run with food stamps than without them.
    - jackcosgrove 10y ago
      Eventually, they pay for it all, and the amount of goods they consume declines as well as productive capacity flees or is shuttered when taxes become punitive. The sovereign goes bankrupt because it has to spend more than it can get in revenue, leading to debt that can only be inflated away. The Soviet Union had bread lines at the end; we've seen this movie before.
      - littlemacha 10y ago
        Given the inevitable rise of autonomy and the move away from labour being necessary to produce goods and services, what would you have us do then? If we reach a point where we automate more jobs than can be replaced, we either face rampant poverty or we have to move to a system like UBI. It's certainly socialism adjacent, but I wouldn't consider it Soviet style communism.
EGreg 10y ago
UBI should ideally be funded by taxes on the savings by coroporations due to automation and outsourcing which reduces demand for local workers. Then it would truly scale with the times. Alaska is doing it based on a natural resource tax. Justin Trudeau in Canada just did an experiment as well - not sure where their funda come from. I think companies taking advantage of a public good should be taxed and the result redistributed as UBI. Personally on an unrelated note I'd try to tax non-biodegradable materials like plastic and the huge amounts of carbon being released from the ground... but that's near impossible to do politically to any great degree.
xchaotic 10y ago
Unfortunately, it is impossible to isolate a community in modern society. One way or another the funds will leak, for example, IS funded income being used by Kenyans to buy Chinese TVs. That money will take a long way to come back to Kenya or US, but there may be a positive net effect even if it doesn't.
dec0dedab0de 10y ago
This is missing perhaps the most controversial part of the Universal Basic Income: that it's funded by the same population that it's helping I prefer the idea of basic income taking the place of debt for the creation of money. This way the tax is in the form of inflation, and everyone gets to directly benefit from the creation of new money instead of just the banks and those blessed by the banks.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  That's how it was handled in some of Heinlein's stories. The government calculated the value of new goods and services that had become available, then issue that amount of new money as direct payments to the people. Done correctly (yeah, right), that wouldn't be inflationary at all (although it seems like you'd also need some mechanism to claw the money back if the economy shrank).
wpietri 10y ago
> A more realistic test would be to take those 6,000 Kenyans, tax them in some way (e.g. take 2x from 3,000 people), then distribute the money equally. Not at all. The theory of UBI is that in the West we're wealthy enough that we produce way more than we need. Ergo, we can afford to give everybody the basics. Doing the same experiment in a much poorer context would produce a very different outcome. As an aside, I think your theory of ownership is throwing your intuitions off. You seem to think of all resources as being owned entirely by some set of current individuals. That's certainly the default model in the US, but that's not the only way to look at it. Much of the wealth in the US was created by previous generations or in large part derived from that inheritance. Instead of capriciously assigning that to current individuals based on blood ties and other luck, you can also look at that as being a joint inheritance. Thus, something like the UBI can be viewed not as taking from individual A to give to individual B, but to use our joint inheritance to make sure everybody has the minimum necessities of survival. I hasten to add that I don't see either of these models as "right". Fitting the complexities of a modern economy into a primate's model of territoriality will never work all that well. But there's historical precedent in things like the Spanish ejido, the Aztec calpulli, and English commons.
murbard2 10y ago
That's the thing about the Universal Basic Income, the "controversy" is always phrased in terms of: "Oh but will this really help people?" or "Oh, but people will just sit and do nothing and that's not good" and always carefully avoids: "Hey, who will pay for all of this?"
- billmalarky 10y ago
  I have never witnessed a single discussion about basic income where "Hey, who will pay for all of this?" isn't practically the first question out of everyone's mouth. Stop framing the discussion as underhanded/deceptive.
TallGuyShort 10y ago
As an experiment to see if it's economically viable, yes it's flawed. But to explore possible benefits it still has value. What originally made me more open to the idea was reading about a similar (I think) experiment and all the indirect outcomes like kids staying in school instead of working to support their families, more families with one parent often with the children, etc.
- JonFish85 10y ago
  And that's valuable, sure. My point is more a question of if it's truly a "Universal Basic Income" experiment, it should be done so that it's paid for by the taxpayers of that same system. My suspicion is that such a program would dissolve fairly quickly because the tax burden falls squarely on people who have worked the hardest to pay their own bills and to provide for their own family. If they suddenly have to lower their quality of life, or their kids' quality of life to pay for someone who they perceive as not working very hard, then the system gets difficult. It's much simpler to make money appear out of thin air (as it effectively is when you take millions of dollars from rich folks in California) and distribute it in Africa. But if you have to take money some folks' pockets in Africa to give to their neighbors, that to me is a more 1-to-1 comparison at what happens for a UBI.
  - surfaceTensi0n 10y ago
    Why do you think UBI would be paid for by people who need it most? My assumption is that it would be paid for with a combination of cuts to social programs (i.e. those replaced by UBI) and more progressive taxes and/or corporations. So in effect it still will be "rich folks" paying for UBI.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      Depends on whether you pay for it mostly from increased taxes or cuts to benefits. It's certainly possible to design a UBI programme where comfortably middle class families are the chief beneficiaries and existing state handout recipients, (i.e. "poor folks") the chief losers. And it's certainly true that many of UBI's most prominent proponents on the right are also amongst the most prominent opponents of any attempt to raise taxes on the rich...
simonebrunozzi 10y ago
I don't know why you're being upvoted. Your argument, to me, is meaningless. Basic income is about having enough money to eat and get shelter, without ANY need to work - and see what happens to human beings in that condition. If the same human being has to fund its own basic income, what's the point? Basic income, to me, HAS to be funded by someone other than the recipient. Otherwise, it's no experiment at all.
- JonFish85 10y ago
  I get the "point" of UBI, but there is the problem of who pays for it. The answer of "other folks" is very difficult, and to me, the most controversial part of it, which is what I said. To make sure we have the same premise, Universal, by definition, means everyone within a certain boundary (e.g. citizen of a country, city, state, whatever) receives the money, regardless of their income, location, etc? To be functional, the money that is doled out needs to be collected from somewhere. It isn't that each specific person needs to fund themselves, but the set of people that receive the "Universal" basic income needs to generate the income needed to pay for it. If an outside set of people pays for it, then it's not a universal basic income, it's something else -- it's taking money from one set of people to give to another. I believe the whole idea of UBI is that everyone gets that same money. The real problem is the collection problem: if you have a set of these 3,000 people who receive, say, $100/mo (made-up number), then I think a true test of Universal Basic Income is that the income has to come from that same set of 3,000 people. In what way is that meaningless? I think it's a valid question to ask.
  - clueless123 10y ago
    It is an experiment. If the experiment shows a big enough benefit (increase in productivity, reduced costs on healthcare, improvements on education, etc) then, you start thinking where is that money coming from.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      But we don't need to run an experiment to know that giving 6000 people regular income will make them generally better off; that's obvious, especially in the context of a developing country. We need to run an experiment to identify whether redistributing tax money to everybody equally and unconditionally results in better outcomes than various other existing or proposed systems of needs-based handouts, which is a completely different scenario, not least because for a significant proportion of people in the experiment this is going to represent a reduction in their current incomes or other benefits.
RangerScience 10y ago
Wowsers wrong. Why are you trying to test both the motor AND the battery at the same time? Test one, then the other. Isolate the variables; change as little as possible at a time to test your hypothesis, which in this case is: Just giving people guaranteed money for a long time is the best way to help them. Thing I'd be most worried about is protecting those communities from other violent people and/or mad influx of people trying to join those communities. Island cultures might be better - more isolated. PS - I did think of an answer to "why not cash?" but it's something that's also addressable: Bulk purchasing advantage. AFAIK, it's more cost-efficient to feed 1000 people all at once than one at a time.
nksjndfdf 10y ago
A very similar idea to basic income has been tried and failed miserably because it ends up as employer subsidies. If you are willing to work for X money a year, and you get a basic income of Y money a year, then you will be willing to work for X - Y money per year if other conditions don't change. This is will end up as tax-payers subsidizing corporations in the long run. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  If Y is enough to live on, you might decide X is not enough to keep you doing that job and look for something else.
  - nksjndfdf 10y ago
    It depends what you mean my 'enough to live on', because you can live on very little or no income, but you won't live well. At our current state we cannot provide enough for everybody for free, this might be possible in the future, but not for the next 50 years. Basic income does not fit well with our current system, it would be wiser to invest that money into useful projects such as free healthcare, education, transportation in my opinion.
stegosaurus 10y ago
Generally in Western countries, the groups that pay in and take out are quite disparate. The universal basic income would be paid for by the upper and middle classes, and taken by the working class. At least in the UK these groups are seperated enough that there's very little socialization between them, very little overlap in voting preferences, etcetera. Different cultures, within the same country.

JulianMorrison 10y ago

I would rather have a world UBI funded by world-level income and capital taxes. The richer countries owe places like Kenya big for centuries of extractive imperial policies.

jackcosgrove 10y ago
British colonization of Kenya started in the mid-19th century and ended in 1962. Before that the Arabs and Portuguese were only able to control the coasts. So "centuries of extractive imperial policies" is a bit of hyperbole. Do the Italians owe the French compensation for Julius Caesar's campaigns? This game can go on forever.
logfromblammo 10y ago
I would dearly love to see the note I signed to assume that debt. Nobody owes anybody anything for the things their great-grandparents did. Or for the things their grandparents did. Or for the things their parents did. Or for the things their siblings do. Life happens right now, not 10, 20, 50, 100, or 1000 years ago. The problem with worldwide UBI is the same as nationwide UBI. The cash is just a token to split up complicated market-clearing trades into a collection of simple half-trades. You still need the goods and services to be produced and distributed. If you take a million US dollars and give it to a Kenyan, that Kenyan would still have to send some of it right back to New York to fill up a cargo ship and send it to Nairobi, because the local markets aren't equipped to handle that ripple in the money supply. Rather than taking the money, and moving it, you have to take the productivity and move it. You would have to industrialize Kenya to the same extent as the US. You would have to pave it with the same roads, wire it with the same cables, police it with the same cops (or maybe better cops), do business with the same contract law. I think the reason Kenya is still Kenya after the colonial period is because it does not wan't to be the 51st state of the US, or another member state of the EU. And it does not yet have enough robots operating there to sustain a meaningful UBI. Worldwide UBI means worldwide industrialization and uniform business laws. You can't just screw with the money and expect it to work.

placeybordeaux 10y ago

That is what matters to you, it's not the only important way to use this concept. Charity has fucked up the world in many places many times. This is a chance to stop that.

Retric 10y ago

Poverty is localized, so you do get outside money into poor communities. Think about it like this, does Bill Gates live next to a poor person? Would Basic Income in his area tell you much about basic income in the US?

savanaly 10y ago

Most of the discussion of UBI that I've seen posits it as something to replace the social safety net. The social safety net is obviously not paid for by the people it helps (except in some small way, perhaps), so why would UBI be? True, part of the social safety net is inevitably returned to the richer portions of the population through their own share, but inevitably the net flow is towards the poorer population.

jackcosgrove 10y ago
The social safety net is eventually paid for by the people it helps through inflation of the prices of basic goods and services.
- savanaly 10y ago
  Perhaps partially. But their real income can be inferred from how many goods they consume, and I don't think anyone would dispute they get to consume more goods in the short and long run with food stamps than without them.
  - jackcosgrove 10y ago
    Eventually, they pay for it all, and the amount of goods they consume declines as well as productive capacity flees or is shuttered when taxes become punitive. The sovereign goes bankrupt because it has to spend more than it can get in revenue, leading to debt that can only be inflated away. The Soviet Union had bread lines at the end; we've seen this movie before.
    - littlemacha 10y ago
      Given the inevitable rise of autonomy and the move away from labour being necessary to produce goods and services, what would you have us do then? If we reach a point where we automate more jobs than can be replaced, we either face rampant poverty or we have to move to a system like UBI. It's certainly socialism adjacent, but I wouldn't consider it Soviet style communism.

EGreg 10y ago

UBI should ideally be funded by taxes on the savings by coroporations due to automation and outsourcing which reduces demand for local workers. Then it would truly scale with the times. Alaska is doing it based on a natural resource tax. Justin Trudeau in Canada just did an experiment as well - not sure where their funda come from. I think companies taking advantage of a public good should be taxed and the result redistributed as UBI. Personally on an unrelated note I'd try to tax non-biodegradable materials like plastic and the huge amounts of carbon being released from the ground... but that's near impossible to do politically to any great degree.

xchaotic 10y ago

Unfortunately, it is impossible to isolate a community in modern society. One way or another the funds will leak, for example, IS funded income being used by Kenyans to buy Chinese TVs. That money will take a long way to come back to Kenya or US, but there may be a positive net effect even if it doesn't.

dec0dedab0de 10y ago

This is missing perhaps the most controversial part of the Universal Basic Income: that it's funded by the same population that it's helping I prefer the idea of basic income taking the place of debt for the creation of money. This way the tax is in the form of inflation, and everyone gets to directly benefit from the creation of new money instead of just the banks and those blessed by the banks.

Turing_Machine 10y ago
That's how it was handled in some of Heinlein's stories. The government calculated the value of new goods and services that had become available, then issue that amount of new money as direct payments to the people. Done correctly (yeah, right), that wouldn't be inflationary at all (although it seems like you'd also need some mechanism to claw the money back if the economy shrank).

wpietri 10y ago

> A more realistic test would be to take those 6,000 Kenyans, tax them in some way (e.g. take 2x from 3,000 people), then distribute the money equally. Not at all. The theory of UBI is that in the West we're wealthy enough that we produce way more than we need. Ergo, we can afford to give everybody the basics. Doing the same experiment in a much poorer context would produce a very different outcome. As an aside, I think your theory of ownership is throwing your intuitions off. You seem to think of all resources as being owned entirely by some set of current individuals. That's certainly the default model in the US, but that's not the only way to look at it. Much of the wealth in the US was created by previous generations or in large part derived from that inheritance. Instead of capriciously assigning that to current individuals based on blood ties and other luck, you can also look at that as being a joint inheritance. Thus, something like the UBI can be viewed not as taking from individual A to give to individual B, but to use our joint inheritance to make sure everybody has the minimum necessities of survival. I hasten to add that I don't see either of these models as "right". Fitting the complexities of a modern economy into a primate's model of territoriality will never work all that well. But there's historical precedent in things like the Spanish ejido, the Aztec calpulli, and English commons.

murbard2 10y ago

That's the thing about the Universal Basic Income, the "controversy" is always phrased in terms of: "Oh but will this really help people?" or "Oh, but people will just sit and do nothing and that's not good" and always carefully avoids: "Hey, who will pay for all of this?"

billmalarky 10y ago
I have never witnessed a single discussion about basic income where "Hey, who will pay for all of this?" isn't practically the first question out of everyone's mouth. Stop framing the discussion as underhanded/deceptive.

TallGuyShort 10y ago

As an experiment to see if it's economically viable, yes it's flawed. But to explore possible benefits it still has value. What originally made me more open to the idea was reading about a similar (I think) experiment and all the indirect outcomes like kids staying in school instead of working to support their families, more families with one parent often with the children, etc.

JonFish85 10y ago
And that's valuable, sure. My point is more a question of if it's truly a "Universal Basic Income" experiment, it should be done so that it's paid for by the taxpayers of that same system. My suspicion is that such a program would dissolve fairly quickly because the tax burden falls squarely on people who have worked the hardest to pay their own bills and to provide for their own family. If they suddenly have to lower their quality of life, or their kids' quality of life to pay for someone who they perceive as not working very hard, then the system gets difficult. It's much simpler to make money appear out of thin air (as it effectively is when you take millions of dollars from rich folks in California) and distribute it in Africa. But if you have to take money some folks' pockets in Africa to give to their neighbors, that to me is a more 1-to-1 comparison at what happens for a UBI.
- surfaceTensi0n 10y ago
  Why do you think UBI would be paid for by people who need it most? My assumption is that it would be paid for with a combination of cuts to social programs (i.e. those replaced by UBI) and more progressive taxes and/or corporations. So in effect it still will be "rich folks" paying for UBI.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Depends on whether you pay for it mostly from increased taxes or cuts to benefits. It's certainly possible to design a UBI programme where comfortably middle class families are the chief beneficiaries and existing state handout recipients, (i.e. "poor folks") the chief losers. And it's certainly true that many of UBI's most prominent proponents on the right are also amongst the most prominent opponents of any attempt to raise taxes on the rich...

simonebrunozzi 10y ago

I don't know why you're being upvoted. Your argument, to me, is meaningless. Basic income is about having enough money to eat and get shelter, without ANY need to work - and see what happens to human beings in that condition. If the same human being has to fund its own basic income, what's the point? Basic income, to me, HAS to be funded by someone other than the recipient. Otherwise, it's no experiment at all.

JonFish85 10y ago
I get the "point" of UBI, but there is the problem of who pays for it. The answer of "other folks" is very difficult, and to me, the most controversial part of it, which is what I said. To make sure we have the same premise, Universal, by definition, means everyone within a certain boundary (e.g. citizen of a country, city, state, whatever) receives the money, regardless of their income, location, etc? To be functional, the money that is doled out needs to be collected from somewhere. It isn't that each specific person needs to fund themselves, but the set of people that receive the "Universal" basic income needs to generate the income needed to pay for it. If an outside set of people pays for it, then it's not a universal basic income, it's something else -- it's taking money from one set of people to give to another. I believe the whole idea of UBI is that everyone gets that same money. The real problem is the collection problem: if you have a set of these 3,000 people who receive, say, $100/mo (made-up number), then I think a true test of Universal Basic Income is that the income has to come from that same set of 3,000 people. In what way is that meaningless? I think it's a valid question to ask.
- clueless123 10y ago
  It is an experiment. If the experiment shows a big enough benefit (increase in productivity, reduced costs on healthcare, improvements on education, etc) then, you start thinking where is that money coming from.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    But we don't need to run an experiment to know that giving 6000 people regular income will make them generally better off; that's obvious, especially in the context of a developing country. We need to run an experiment to identify whether redistributing tax money to everybody equally and unconditionally results in better outcomes than various other existing or proposed systems of needs-based handouts, which is a completely different scenario, not least because for a significant proportion of people in the experiment this is going to represent a reduction in their current incomes or other benefits.

RangerScience 10y ago

Wowsers wrong. Why are you trying to test both the motor AND the battery at the same time? Test one, then the other. Isolate the variables; change as little as possible at a time to test your hypothesis, which in this case is: Just giving people guaranteed money for a long time is the best way to help them. Thing I'd be most worried about is protecting those communities from other violent people and/or mad influx of people trying to join those communities. Island cultures might be better - more isolated. PS - I did think of an answer to "why not cash?" but it's something that's also addressable: Bulk purchasing advantage. AFAIK, it's more cost-efficient to feed 1000 people all at once than one at a time.

nksjndfdf 10y ago

A very similar idea to basic income has been tried and failed miserably because it ends up as employer subsidies. If you are willing to work for X money a year, and you get a basic income of Y money a year, then you will be willing to work for X - Y money per year if other conditions don't change. This is will end up as tax-payers subsidizing corporations in the long run. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system

prodigal_erik 10y ago
If Y is enough to live on, you might decide X is not enough to keep you doing that job and look for something else.
- nksjndfdf 10y ago
  It depends what you mean my 'enough to live on', because you can live on very little or no income, but you won't live well. At our current state we cannot provide enough for everybody for free, this might be possible in the future, but not for the next 50 years. Basic income does not fit well with our current system, it would be wiser to invest that money into useful projects such as free healthcare, education, transportation in my opinion.

stegosaurus 10y ago

Generally in Western countries, the groups that pay in and take out are quite disparate. The universal basic income would be paid for by the upper and middle classes, and taken by the working class. At least in the UK these groups are seperated enough that there's very little socialization between them, very little overlap in voting preferences, etcetera. Different cultures, within the same country.