18 ms·

What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don't seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they

What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don't seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they didn't work. I come from the Netherlands, which has always had unemployment benefits. Nowadays you get those only if you meet a bunch of strict conditions but it hasn't always been so tough. In the early eighties, there were almost no checks whatsoever. The result was that many people started to see the benefit as a 'right', and that the choice to work or not to work was a matter of personal choice. So basically the same thing that BI tries to achieve. But the result in the Netherlands was that more and more people chose not to work, or chose to do work that didn't pay anything, or worked for black money and collect the social benefit at the same time. In the end the whole system just got too expensive and had to be adjusted to be much more strict. Tl;Dr; BI is a very nice idea on paper but unfortunately becomes too expensive in practice.

douglance 10y ago
The idea is that we will develop such stunning abundance that living costs will be very inexpensive and a basic income will be a manageable cost for the government.
- danielweber 10y ago
  So my taxes will drop, right?
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    Net of the UBI? Sure. A UBI which is exactly as redistributive as the existing welfare system would reduce taxes (or increase the UBI you receive) by the difference in the administrative costs between the existing welfare system and the UBI. And that's before the economic benefits of increasing the incentive to work for low and middle income people by not reducing their government transfer payments when they get a job.
shkkmo 10y ago
Unemployment insurance is not BI. BI goes to everyone, Unemployment insurance only goes to people who aren't working legally. Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black market labor. BI does not do that. It does (if we get replace minimum wage with basic income) allow people to do work that pays nothing or very little. However, I would see that as boosting overall economic productivity since it allows a wider range of job and thus helps offset the loss of jobs to increasing automation. As far as the expense. I would advocate scaling BI up as we scale the minimum wage down, allowing us to grow the program as we can afford it while boosting the economy (and thus tax revenue) with lower labor costs.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  It does allow people to do work that pays nothing or very little. However, I would see that as boosting overall economic productivity That's a contradiction. Productivity is defined as output divided by hours worked. Output is defined roughly as "sales of things that people want". Putting aside market failures for a moment, work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done. There are lots of people who will happily churn out poems about their personal angst all day if they had the opportunity to do so and call it 'work' but if nobody wants to buy their poems then it's not considered economic productivity. And it must be this way as otherwise you could get idiotic situations like someone who just goes running every day and says they were "productive" because they did "work", ignoring that it was income free because it didn't help anyone else. At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless.
  - shkkmo 10y ago
    > That's a contradiction. Productivity is defined as output divided by hours worked. Output is defined roughly as "sales of things that people want". I used the wrong word, I meant 'overall economic production'. Economic participation is falling during this "recovery", and that is not just due to baby boomers aging: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-the-real-unemplo... > work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done I disagree, but I think this disagreement boils down to underlying problems I see with the ways in which we tend to measure economic output and GDP. If I write a poem that brings me no pleasure and I sell it to you, and you write a poem that brings you no pleasure and you sell it to me. That "counts" as economic productions. However, if I write a poem that brings me pleasure and you write a poem that brings you pleasure and nothing is sold, the same value is produced but it doesn't "count" towards economic production. You may not like poetry, but there are tons of other examples: Grandparents who babysit their grandchildren, people who fix their own cars, people who grow and cook their own food, people who write open source software, people who volunteer with non-profits, the list goes on and on. > At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless. While it is hard to measure productive work that isn't tied to the exchange of goods or services, that doesn't make that work meaningless, nor does it mean it has no value. Conversely, I would argue that there is a large amount of "unproductive work" or "busy work" that doesn't really produce value, but does involve the exchange of goods and services. Specific examples are controversial, but some potential ones are: fighting frivolous lawsuits, political fundraising, defensive patents, and many types of advertising. see: https://medium.com/basic-income/basic-income-meaningless-jobs-david-graeber-stenography-402e3bddeb45#.mvnzhfi59 https://medium.com/basic-income/basic-income-meaningless-job... I think many of these many of these jobs provide "competitive advantage" in marketplace but produce little to no actual value to society. Every corporation needs someone doing these jobs so they can stay competitive, but it ends up becoming an arms race of economic waste. My hope is that by reducing the necessity of work that get paid well, we are able to start weeding out some of the BS work and enabling people to do more of the less/un paid work that produces hard to measure value. I think we should accomplish this by incrementally phasing in basic income pair with gradually phasing out minimum wage. Each increment should happen at the start of a recession so the the increase in government spending on BI paired with the availability of cheaper labor (due to lower minimum wage) can prompt growth and shorten the recession.
cbr 10y ago
> worked for black money and collect the social benefit at the same time This one doesn't apply to BI, since you get the same amount of BI money whether you work or not and regardless of how much you earn.
- k2enemy 10y ago
  I keep seeing this repeated in discussions about BI, but I honestly have no idea how it would be possible. I get that everyone receives the same size check, no matter what their income, but who pays for the BI program? I assume it is funded through taxes and that people that earn more income will pay higher taxes. So once you take BI received - taxes paid, people that earn more outside income get less from the BI program than those that don't. And we are back in the same situation where a welfare program creates disincentives for work.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    Umm... No, that's the situation where taxes create a disincentive to work. Try solving that without having taxes be a flat fee.
    - k2enemy 10y ago
      Fine, but if BI is not funded through taxes, then how is it funded?
      - Sammi 10y ago
        He didn't say _no_ taxes. He said _no flat_ taxes. Think progressive taxes instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax
        AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        That isn't even strictly necessary. There is a difference between a "flat tax" (e.g. everyone pays 20%) and a "flat fee" (e.g. everyone pays $10,000). A UBI funded by a flat tax is completely unproblematic. People who make $80,000 pay $16,000 and this makes up the difference for the people who make $20,000 and pay $4,000 when they each get a $10,000 UBI.
hellofunk 10y ago
There are places in Europe [0] also experimenting with government-sponsored BI but the Netherlands is not one of those from what I understand, and what you describe is not at all what BI is. [0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finland-to-consider-introducing-universal-basic-income-in-2017-a6963321.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finland-to-co...
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  The Netherlands is experimenting with Basic Income: http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-residents-a-no-strings-attached-basic-income/ http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-resid...
Namrog84 10y ago
I think you miss the point of why we actually need BI research and one of the foundational reasons for it. I know predictions could be off. But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. What are they gonna do? Just all starve to death? BI is the inevitable step towards a post scarcity society. When majority of people not only don't want to work but that there are simply no jobs for most people yet there is plenty still to buy/consume because automation. This has nothing to do with your 1980s example because there were still plenty of jobs to be had that needed doing.
- return0 10y ago
  The reason why they do specifically BI research, is because BI will prevent the Market from collapse since people will still have the discretion of buying things, instead of rationing. Otherwise, BI is not the simplest, not the most obvious, and not the inevitable way to provide for the unemployable. As long as there are human needs , there will be people willing to do those jobs, so it's not like the starving people will just sit there waiting to die anyway.
- danielweber 10y ago
  > But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. It means we are living in paradise. There is nothing to be cleaned. There is nothing to be fixed. There is nothing to be repaired. There is nothing to be trimmed or maintained.
  - lawpoop 10y ago
    I think you misunderstand market economics. There might be things to do, but the owners would not be willing to pay people a living wage to do them. People without a living wage can't afford housing, groceries, etc. etc. etc. Like how Ireland('s landed gentry) was exported potatoes during the potato famine. There was plenty of food; the locals just couldn't afford it.
    - danielweber 10y ago
      > I think you misunderstand market economics. I dunno, this doesn't sound like what I learned in my official concentration at MIT. Hey, how about a real argument, instead of one that doesn't rely on accusations of ignorance or appeal to credentials? That would be awesome. > There might be things to do, but the owners would not be willing to pay people a living wage to do them. The proper response is EITC or NIT. This takes the work that is below the worker's reservation wage and puts it above the worker's reservation wage. Saying "there are no jobs available to 60% of the population" is a solution (BI) looking for a problem (no employment). If you were to actually come across this problem in the wild, where there was lots of work to be done but it was all below labor's reservation wage, the obvious answer would be to subsidize labor.
MicroBerto 10y ago
What I've found here on HN is that there is an extremely large amount of "wishful projection" and selection bias, in that many people here are young and promising entrepreneurs-in-training, and they believe that basic income will allow them to work on their startup dream without having to worry about paying the bills. While that may be true, they fail to realize that they are in the extreme minority of actually-motivated people who would make a good use-case of basic income. The vast majority of the world will fall into other categories, such as non-productivity or black markets. Not everyone wants to go build the next great app, folks! I personally believe that this is the most important decision that humans must make over the next half-century, as we automate nearly everything and have little need for cheap human labor: What do you do with all of those idle hands and minds? In my opinion, if you allow the masses to do absolutely nothing while providing them the necessities for life, society will collapse upon itself over time, as people vote themselves more and more benefits for doing less and less work, while ostracizing the working and ownership classes. Question is only how many generations it takes. My favorite example is what happens when you put rats into such a utopia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM IMHO, humans are no better than they (possibly far worse, in fact), and I see no reason to believe how anything else will happen over the course of several generations of "free stuff". Humans without responsibilities and accountability = chaos. Tell me it hasn't already begun.
- Mahn 10y ago
  > if you allow the masses to do absolutely nothing while providing them the necessities for life Perhaps I'm underestimating the issue, but isn't there already today a sizeable chunk of the population in the world that does nothing or close to nothing, but still enjoys a good quality of life? Some people have the drive to work and create things, others are content with just consuming and making families; we have always had that, the only difference is that BI would make life easier for the latter group, but it doesn't strike to me as something that would radically change society as a whole.
  - MicroBerto 10y ago
    > but isn't there already today a sizeable chunk of the population in the world that does nothing or close to nothing .... and where do you see the majority of violent crimes occurring??
biafra 10y ago
There is not enough paid work for everyone. Automation will kill more and more jobs. I see BI as the only humane solution to keep automating stuff.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Unemployment insurance (even if its not time limited, and the benefit isn't set by your income by previous employment -- which are typically the case with UI schemes) is not at all like BI, because unemployment insurance is lost when you are employed, whereas BI is not; avoiding the disincentive to work that comes with tailing off benefits rapidly with labor income is central to the concept of BI.

douglance 10y ago

The idea is that we will develop such stunning abundance that living costs will be very inexpensive and a basic income will be a manageable cost for the government.

danielweber 10y ago
So my taxes will drop, right?
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  Net of the UBI? Sure. A UBI which is exactly as redistributive as the existing welfare system would reduce taxes (or increase the UBI you receive) by the difference in the administrative costs between the existing welfare system and the UBI. And that's before the economic benefits of increasing the incentive to work for low and middle income people by not reducing their government transfer payments when they get a job.

shkkmo 10y ago

Unemployment insurance is not BI. BI goes to everyone, Unemployment insurance only goes to people who aren't working legally. Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black market labor. BI does not do that. It does (if we get replace minimum wage with basic income) allow people to do work that pays nothing or very little. However, I would see that as boosting overall economic productivity since it allows a wider range of job and thus helps offset the loss of jobs to increasing automation. As far as the expense. I would advocate scaling BI up as we scale the minimum wage down, allowing us to grow the program as we can afford it while boosting the economy (and thus tax revenue) with lower labor costs.

sievebrain 10y ago
It does allow people to do work that pays nothing or very little. However, I would see that as boosting overall economic productivity That's a contradiction. Productivity is defined as output divided by hours worked. Output is defined roughly as "sales of things that people want". Putting aside market failures for a moment, work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done. There are lots of people who will happily churn out poems about their personal angst all day if they had the opportunity to do so and call it 'work' but if nobody wants to buy their poems then it's not considered economic productivity. And it must be this way as otherwise you could get idiotic situations like someone who just goes running every day and says they were "productive" because they did "work", ignoring that it was income free because it didn't help anyone else. At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless.
- shkkmo 10y ago
  > That's a contradiction. Productivity is defined as output divided by hours worked. Output is defined roughly as "sales of things that people want". I used the wrong word, I meant 'overall economic production'. Economic participation is falling during this "recovery", and that is not just due to baby boomers aging: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-the-real-unemplo... > work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done I disagree, but I think this disagreement boils down to underlying problems I see with the ways in which we tend to measure economic output and GDP. If I write a poem that brings me no pleasure and I sell it to you, and you write a poem that brings you no pleasure and you sell it to me. That "counts" as economic productions. However, if I write a poem that brings me pleasure and you write a poem that brings you pleasure and nothing is sold, the same value is produced but it doesn't "count" towards economic production. You may not like poetry, but there are tons of other examples: Grandparents who babysit their grandchildren, people who fix their own cars, people who grow and cook their own food, people who write open source software, people who volunteer with non-profits, the list goes on and on. > At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless. While it is hard to measure productive work that isn't tied to the exchange of goods or services, that doesn't make that work meaningless, nor does it mean it has no value. Conversely, I would argue that there is a large amount of "unproductive work" or "busy work" that doesn't really produce value, but does involve the exchange of goods and services. Specific examples are controversial, but some potential ones are: fighting frivolous lawsuits, political fundraising, defensive patents, and many types of advertising. see: https://medium.com/basic-income/basic-income-meaningless-jobs-david-graeber-stenography-402e3bddeb45#.mvnzhfi59 https://medium.com/basic-income/basic-income-meaningless-job... I think many of these many of these jobs provide "competitive advantage" in marketplace but produce little to no actual value to society. Every corporation needs someone doing these jobs so they can stay competitive, but it ends up becoming an arms race of economic waste. My hope is that by reducing the necessity of work that get paid well, we are able to start weeding out some of the BS work and enabling people to do more of the less/un paid work that produces hard to measure value. I think we should accomplish this by incrementally phasing in basic income pair with gradually phasing out minimum wage. Each increment should happen at the start of a recession so the the increase in government spending on BI paired with the availability of cheaper labor (due to lower minimum wage) can prompt growth and shorten the recession.

cbr 10y ago

> worked for black money and collect the social benefit at the same time This one doesn't apply to BI, since you get the same amount of BI money whether you work or not and regardless of how much you earn.

k2enemy 10y ago
I keep seeing this repeated in discussions about BI, but I honestly have no idea how it would be possible. I get that everyone receives the same size check, no matter what their income, but who pays for the BI program? I assume it is funded through taxes and that people that earn more income will pay higher taxes. So once you take BI received - taxes paid, people that earn more outside income get less from the BI program than those that don't. And we are back in the same situation where a welfare program creates disincentives for work.
- tormeh 10y ago
  Umm... No, that's the situation where taxes create a disincentive to work. Try solving that without having taxes be a flat fee.
  - k2enemy 10y ago
    Fine, but if BI is not funded through taxes, then how is it funded?
    - Sammi 10y ago
      He didn't say _no_ taxes. He said _no flat_ taxes. Think progressive taxes instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        That isn't even strictly necessary. There is a difference between a "flat tax" (e.g. everyone pays 20%) and a "flat fee" (e.g. everyone pays $10,000). A UBI funded by a flat tax is completely unproblematic. People who make $80,000 pay $16,000 and this makes up the difference for the people who make $20,000 and pay $4,000 when they each get a $10,000 UBI.

hellofunk 10y ago

There are places in Europe [0] also experimenting with government-sponsored BI but the Netherlands is not one of those from what I understand, and what you describe is not at all what BI is. [0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finland-to-consider-introducing-universal-basic-income-in-2017-a6963321.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finland-to-co...

DonaldFisk 10y ago
The Netherlands is experimenting with Basic Income: http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-residents-a-no-strings-attached-basic-income/ http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-resid...

Namrog84 10y ago

I think you miss the point of why we actually need BI research and one of the foundational reasons for it. I know predictions could be off. But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. What are they gonna do? Just all starve to death? BI is the inevitable step towards a post scarcity society. When majority of people not only don't want to work but that there are simply no jobs for most people yet there is plenty still to buy/consume because automation. This has nothing to do with your 1980s example because there were still plenty of jobs to be had that needed doing.

return0 10y ago
The reason why they do specifically BI research, is because BI will prevent the Market from collapse since people will still have the discretion of buying things, instead of rationing. Otherwise, BI is not the simplest, not the most obvious, and not the inevitable way to provide for the unemployable. As long as there are human needs , there will be people willing to do those jobs, so it's not like the starving people will just sit there waiting to die anyway.
danielweber 10y ago
> But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. It means we are living in paradise. There is nothing to be cleaned. There is nothing to be fixed. There is nothing to be repaired. There is nothing to be trimmed or maintained.
- lawpoop 10y ago
  I think you misunderstand market economics. There might be things to do, but the owners would not be willing to pay people a living wage to do them. People without a living wage can't afford housing, groceries, etc. etc. etc. Like how Ireland('s landed gentry) was exported potatoes during the potato famine. There was plenty of food; the locals just couldn't afford it.
  - danielweber 10y ago
    > I think you misunderstand market economics. I dunno, this doesn't sound like what I learned in my official concentration at MIT. Hey, how about a real argument, instead of one that doesn't rely on accusations of ignorance or appeal to credentials? That would be awesome. > There might be things to do, but the owners would not be willing to pay people a living wage to do them. The proper response is EITC or NIT. This takes the work that is below the worker's reservation wage and puts it above the worker's reservation wage. Saying "there are no jobs available to 60% of the population" is a solution (BI) looking for a problem (no employment). If you were to actually come across this problem in the wild, where there was lots of work to be done but it was all below labor's reservation wage, the obvious answer would be to subsidize labor.

MicroBerto 10y ago

What I've found here on HN is that there is an extremely large amount of "wishful projection" and selection bias, in that many people here are young and promising entrepreneurs-in-training, and they believe that basic income will allow them to work on their startup dream without having to worry about paying the bills. While that may be true, they fail to realize that they are in the extreme minority of actually-motivated people who would make a good use-case of basic income. The vast majority of the world will fall into other categories, such as non-productivity or black markets. Not everyone wants to go build the next great app, folks! I personally believe that this is the most important decision that humans must make over the next half-century, as we automate nearly everything and have little need for cheap human labor: What do you do with all of those idle hands and minds? In my opinion, if you allow the masses to do absolutely nothing while providing them the necessities for life, society will collapse upon itself over time, as people vote themselves more and more benefits for doing less and less work, while ostracizing the working and ownership classes. Question is only how many generations it takes. My favorite example is what happens when you put rats into such a utopia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM IMHO, humans are no better than they (possibly far worse, in fact), and I see no reason to believe how anything else will happen over the course of several generations of "free stuff". Humans without responsibilities and accountability = chaos. Tell me it hasn't already begun.

Mahn 10y ago
> if you allow the masses to do absolutely nothing while providing them the necessities for life Perhaps I'm underestimating the issue, but isn't there already today a sizeable chunk of the population in the world that does nothing or close to nothing, but still enjoys a good quality of life? Some people have the drive to work and create things, others are content with just consuming and making families; we have always had that, the only difference is that BI would make life easier for the latter group, but it doesn't strike to me as something that would radically change society as a whole.
- MicroBerto 10y ago
  > but isn't there already today a sizeable chunk of the population in the world that does nothing or close to nothing .... and where do you see the majority of violent crimes occurring??

biafra 10y ago

There is not enough paid work for everyone. Automation will kill more and more jobs. I see BI as the only humane solution to keep automating stuff.

dragonwriter 10y ago

Unemployment insurance (even if its not time limited, and the benefit isn't set by your income by previous employment -- which are typically the case with UI schemes) is not at all like BI, because unemployment insurance is lost when you are employed, whereas BI is not; avoiding the disincentive to work that comes with tailing off benefits rapidly with labor income is central to the concept of BI.