12 ms·

Enough with Basic Income

128 points by julbaxter 10y ago

vitno 10y ago
"there’s a libertarian ideological bias in Silicon Valley that seems to turn people into ignorant morons when it comes to social state-related issues. As engineers, some don’t even get the political stakes." "So enough already. Grow up now, study history..." Regardless of the actual content of the article, I found the style of so many unnecessary ad hominim attacks offputing. The actual content of the article isn't really backed up. It mostly seems to say that engineers are seduced by the elegance of Basic Income and that they should really just focus on making the existing social system have less friction. Not a bad opinion, just not really in line with the many statements that "Basic Income won't work".
- jbuzbee 10y ago
  Agreed - The arrogance in the article really turned me off to what might have been some valid points. I read it as: "You simpletons don't have a clue. I know the answer to all the problems". This guy is probably a real "joy" at cocktail parties.
- Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
  I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I'm certainly not the first to point out that Silicon Valley, as an ecosystem, is fundamentally uninterested in politics and history (especially social history). Would you disagree with that? I didn't write that basic income won't work as a solution designed to fix a problem. My point is that I don't see a political path to enacting it, and even though it was enacted, I don't see how it could survive the next round of election. So yes maybe it's time to focus on more winnable fights such as implementing universal health insurance. https://medium.com/@Nicolas_Colin/thanks-for-all-the-responses-399027114d12#.w99ezrg6f https://medium.com/@Nicolas_Colin/thanks-for-all-the-respons...
  - dang 10y ago
    > Silicon Valley, as an ecosystem, is fundamentally uninterested in politics and history (especially social history). Would you disagree with that? Yes, for two reasons. First, the meaning of the label 'Silicon Valley' is unclear, but whatever it means, it shouldn't be anthropomorphized. Doing that is usually just a rhetorical device, and that dilutes arguments. Second, the people I know in Silicon Valley are acutely interested in those things, so I'd say your claim is way off base.
    - Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
      Thanks for replying. I'd say Silicon Valley is synonymous with tech industry here (the article effectively mentions "Silicon Valley and its satellites"). As for the second argument, I trust there is much progress in terms of tackling politics and history in SV, but many sources contributed to forming my opinion: - In "Googled" (published in 2004), Ken Auletta of the "New Yorker" explains in great detail how clueless Google initially was in dealing with Washington, DC., a trait he claims can be linked to the naïveté of engineers who see the world as a collection of "problems" all waiting for a "solution". As an engineer myself, I really recognize that engineering bias. Yet I agree the engineering culture may be stronger at Google than at other tech companies. But it's still dominant in the tech industry. - In his "Secret History of Silicon Valley" conference, Steve Blank constantly jokes about the fact that people in Silicon Valley are ignorant of history, to the point where even students at Stanford University don't have a clue about who was Frederick Terman. - More recently, another "New Yorker" article told the story of Mark Zuckerberg "getting an education" in his failed attempt to transform the education system in the state of New Jersey—see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled -In Europe most of us are appalled at how clumsy SV-based tech companies are when dealing with local governments and adapting to the various cultures, institutions, and special interests => hence the many problems that Uber, Airbnb, Google, and others have here in Europe on the regulatory front (Apple being the latest to suffer that fate with the infamous €14B European tax bill). Maybe it's a false impression. Or maybe in Silicon Valley those who are genuinely interested in geography, history, and politics are not in the executive seats and so far fail to make a difference. But I can assure you that the tech industry's passion with basic income has a direct consequence on the ground: when you try to open up the discussion about the future of social policy, the tech people's response is always: "nevermind those complex policies from the past, basic income will solve everything". Ugh. In most cases the reason is that they read the books by Peter Thiel and others, they read the blogposts by American Entrepreneurs and VCs, they believe the hype around basic income, and, I'm sorry to say, I think they don't have a clue about what it takes to build inclusive and sustainable social institutions.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
There are some good points in here. However, what I think the author misses is that we are within reach of a post-scarcity economy, at which point all of those historical economic references go out the window (since nearly all economic theory assumes scarcity). That possibility makes a UBI experiment very worthwhile to me. I don't think we're there today or anything like that, but it may be within our lifetimes that we're seriously approaching post-scarcity. Renewables are getting cheaper, for instance, which may bring about nearly limitless cheap energy. I won't assume mass scale fusion, but we may tackle the energy issue in other ways (this is my handwaving). Food security is already within reach - most of the issues around it are political (meaning kids in Africa aren't starving because we don't have enough food). The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely. I am obviously an optimist, oversimplifying a lot, and believe that we won't nuke ourselves into oblivion. I also think that we'll eventually solve our political problems - many of which are based on energy issues. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't see an issue with UBI experiments and seeing how it goes. We shouldn't use economic theory as a reason to not try something radically different, as economic theory is wrong often enough to warrant the experiment. It may be worth a look at UBI to look at behavior on a macro level, since I think we're eventually going to get there globally and we'll need to know what the hell to do to occupy ourselves in some way that is still productive in that context.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  There will be no post-scarcity economy, or rather, if there is one, we're already living in it. People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere. The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done" It's never going to work that way. Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again. Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others? The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has? Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.
geomark 10y ago
FTA "...we have long known that technology destroys jobs..." Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Just because it creates jobs doesn't mean it does not also destroy them. There are lots of jobs technology via automation has 'destroyed'. Some new ones were created however to write the software to automate those processes. The important thing is whether it is replacing jobs at the same rate that it is destroying them.
- hk__2 10y ago
  I don’t have data on that but I believe it destroys more jobs than it creates, and this is a good thing. What’s the point of automating our lives if in the end people still have to work?
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had." For an alternative view, I like the horses example in this video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
  I wrote the article so I hope you'll continue reading :-) Technology destroys some jobs and it creates others, but those new jobs are numerous enough only if we put in place the right institutions (sustainable and inclusive). We're not there yet (and I don't see UBI as one of those). This is an older article about job destruction and job creation: https://salon.thefamily.co/another-100-days-a-digital-new-deal-for-workers-dd557e767df3 https://salon.thefamily.co/another-100-days-a-digital-new-de...
onli 10y ago
The article fails to present a good alternative to a basic income, or if it did I missed it. While I don't believe in that concept, I also don't think that "I think it is fair to say that being unqualified is less of a risk today" is a fair statement to make today. Tell that the steel workers whose factory just shut down, and tell them they should become entrepreneurs instead. What an arrogance!
- ebalit 10y ago
  I think the alternative proposed by the article is clear: use the money to provide universal services. The author also mention the fight for Obamacare as more pragmatic. I think his argument are mainly targeted at the US were universal services are lacking (or perceived as lacking).
teraflop 10y ago
> You have to fill in many papers, prove that you don’t have sufficient income or any valuable property, go through many humiliating and intrusive controls. If you want to earn (a small amount of) money without working, then you must endure it all. In most cases it is necessary to seek the help of a social worker to carry out the procedure in its entirety. Funny how the article zeroes in on this as a criticism of basic income, even though it describes the biggest way France's system is totally different from what basic income advocates are talking about.
- newjersey 10y ago
  > You have to fill in many papers, prove that you don’t have sufficient income or any valuable property, go through many humiliating and intrusive controls. If you want to earn (a small amount of) money without working, then you must endure it all. In most cases it is necessary to seek the help of a social worker to carry out the procedure in its entirety. This is exactly the reason I want basic income. I want nobody to feel like someone else is cheating the system. I hear a bunch of people (even old people who are on medicare and social security!) who will talk trash about "welfare queens". It is not like we can't afford it. There will be short term pain, of course but I think we will have greater solidarity. This is good for the 0.01% as well because if you are doing really well, you want to keep the ship steady. (Well to be cynical, you could try to keep everyone else fighting amongst themselves but any arsonist will tell you that a fire once started won't spare the people who started it.)
  - blahi 10y ago
    And what happens in the very long term? What happens when kids are raised with the attitude that they are guaranteed to survive on basic income? What happens when their number grows? What happens when that large group feels that bare survival doesn't cut it any more and want more? What happens if the numbers actually don't pan out but scared politicians doon't want to give up power and cook the books for decades? Remember that after similar initiatives short and mid-term gains were huge, but in the long-term they lead to apathy, corruption and very uncompetitive economy. There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink. You remove the incentive to grow and guess what happens next. Or if you want to really start thinking hard, maybe you should ask yourself what happens when everybody has X in money and businesses raise their prices accordingly?
deleted 10y ago
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chx 10y ago
> The leading argument is that there won’t be any jobs left anyway, and that meanwhile technology will bring all the costs down. Oh there will be many jobs left but they will all require a certain level of education, let's call that university degree for the sake of simplicity. Also people will need to have some degree of mental capacity to attain this level. It is pretty much natural to presume not everyone will have this mental capacity. Already this is showing everywhere. What will society do with those who have the physical capability but not the mental to work? BI is one of the answers. It may not be the best answer but do have a better one? We need an answer right effin' now because long range trucking will be automated away Real Soon Now(TM) and that's (at least in Canada) is one of the most populated occupation and society level answers are never reached quick.
jrbapna 10y ago
A quick look at humanities progress, and its fairly obvious where we're headed. there will be a day where many people won't have to work to survive. There will be an extreme amount of abundance in the economy due to technology and automation. More for everyone... :) Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.
jkot 10y ago
How about immigration? Once Basic Income is introduced in one area, people from all over the world will start moving there. Right now SF is not even capable to host 450 homeless arriving every year. What would you do if that number of people arrived every day or every hour?
- daenney 10y ago
  > people from all over the world will start moving there. I don't think immigration laws would permit that. For one, you couldn't "just move" to the US like that. Within the EU it could become an interesting problem if some countries did this and others didn't. I suspect that if anyone were to try this there'll be some limitations at first, like you have to have citizenship, or prove legal residency for longer than "since the past few minutes".
  - jkot 10y ago
    But that would not be really basic income (which is unconditional). There would be second class of citizens. Something like controlled rent today.
    - TillE 10y ago
      I can't vote in Germany. I'm not a "second class of citizen", I'm literally not a citizen.
      - jkot 10y ago
        But you are "citizen enough" to pay taxes or receive social benefits. And some non-citizens can vote in Germany. Anyway, by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it.
        chillwaves 10y ago
        > by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it. Doesn't have to be. Some versions are, some aren't. Given we are talking about a system that does not exist, not sure why you say it is one thing or the other. Some versions give to minors, some do not. Some only give to citizens in good standing (no felons). Conditions can exist and should exist in my opinion.
Dwolb 10y ago
Side note: are there platforms that make responding to essays easier for the writer and reader to follow the logic? It'd help for replying to pieces like the OP. I struggled with this example on the RMI/RSA in France. >So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. The author holds this example up as why UBI might fail. But the reasons listed why the RMI/RSA failed are all either driving forces for UBI or solved by UBI. 1) RMI/RSA is complicated to administer due to high burden of proof for the individual to demonstrate no income. UBI solves this by allowing everyone to have an income, not just those without a salary. 2) RMI/RSA has adverse economic effects because it disincentivizes people to seek jobs. Part of why people are thinking UBI could be a good idea is there will be fewer jobs in the future and so disincentivization to look for a job for a subset of the population is partially a good thing. 3) RMI/RSA is politically difficult. That's why people involved in the UBI movement are running private, small scale experiments. They want to prove/disprove their hypotheses to provide evidence in favor of or against UBI.
wilwade 10y ago
A reasonable article, albeit not capturing the full argument for UBI. One missing pro-argument is reducing the creativity monetary risk barrier. Entrepreneurship is at about 14% working age adults in the US (1). I would say that the number of people who would be entrepreneurs is higher, but limited by risk. Entrepreneurship is very high risk. Reducing that risk would enable more people to become entrepreneurs (a good thing). Removing the risk that being an entrepreneur will make you loose the shirt off your back, will allow more people to start companies. It is not limited to entrepreneurship. How many more amazing painters would there be? Writers? How much more creative common good would there be in the world if basic needs (via UBI) was taken care of? None of the current social risk insurance, are directly reducing this loss to us all. (1) http://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reaches-record-highs.html http://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reache...
- Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
  I wrote the article. Thank your for your response. I get your point about painters and writers. But my guess is that working on affordable housing would do more good on that front—and would be more sustainable politically. You can read this convincing article by Sarah Kendzior: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-cities-are-killing-creativity-2013121065856922461.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-c...
  - arielb1 10y ago
    So the problem with San Fransisco is too much people chasing not enough houses, and your solution is to pay people to buy houses?
k-mcgrady 10y ago
There is a lot in this article I disagree with but let me focus on the NHS argument. >> "The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals." The only reason this is a problem is political. We have the NHS but we also have private options - get rid of those. Then there would be more staff available for the NHS, a huge some of money would not be wasted on locum staff, and therefore more money would be available to the NHS. Some of that could be used for funding and some could be used to pay staff a fairer wage. The fiscal austerity argument is nonsense. We have plenty of money - it's just spent poorly. We don't need to spend £30bn on nuclear missiles we'll never use (and if we ever do need to use them it'll be too late anyway). We don't need to spend £30-40bn on the military. Of course defunding these things is political suicide but you can't tell me we can't afford decent healthcare when we're wasting money on missiles we don't need, a huge military we don't need, and locum staff which shouldn't be a thing in the first place when you have a public health care system.
- bko 10y ago
  So the solution to poor service provided by NHS is to eliminate any competitors and force more people onto NHS hoping that this improves the service?
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    Yes. The amount of money locum staff get is incredible. I know a doctor who exclusively does locum work - he works 3 months a year and has more than enough money to spend the rest of the time travelling. If you eliminate private health care you eliminate that cost and you are the only employer. Edit: To clarify this as it seems like a very unpopular opinion around these parts: a public system isn't going to work in a free/competitive market. I think we need to either go all in on a public system or all in on a private system. When you land somewhere in the middle it just doesn't work.
JabavuAdams 10y ago
Interesting article, and a good mind-expanding summary of various options and history. TL/DR: > Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.
- AdrianB1 10y ago
  I live in a country that has a flat rate tax system. Not a flat tax (as in "equal amount for all taxpayers"), but a flat percentage. The overall tax rate in my country is about double than US and the life quality is worse. Go figure :)
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Fascinating that he picks Blair's Fabian speech as an example of the NHS being a thorn in government's side. I didn't vote for Blair, or support many of his policies, but his governance utterly transformed the NHS for the better. It was adequately funded for the first time in a couple of decades, at the time of this speech, and they were now searching for ways to measurably improve care, especially in comparatively neglected areas such as mental health. Quality goes down when governments start bringing political ideology to the fore - eg "we must bring the efficiency of the market to the NHS" neatly ignores the fact the NHS is actually pretty damn efficient, and is one of the strongest buyers on the planet getting significantly better pricing from all the drug companies. Adding managers and market aspects actually worsened this. The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI. I'm starting to doubt everything he's written by this point.
- 1024core 10y ago
  > The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI. Read the article again. His point is that the RMI (RSA) is what they ended up with, even though they wanted (started with) something similar to UBI.
  - ebalit 10y ago
    No, they did not start with a UBI. RMI was means tested from the start. The RSA was a reform intended to "smooth the edges". While you would lose you're RMI as soon as you start working, now you can keep part of the RSA during a transition period. But the problem with RSA is that it's really complex and most people still don't get it. And it's a lot of paperware for a relatively small amount of money. I think France is actually one of the best place to start a real UBI scheme. Our system is close to UBI but probably the worst implementation possible, with a lot of edge cases. This proposal details a complete reform of our tax system around a UBI: http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09-15_MdeBasquiat.pdf http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09...
- Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
aminok 10y ago
Basic Income (aka universal welfare) is bullshit because it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are confined like captive animals, so that the rest of the population is cowed into handing over the demanded amount. Likewise, the author's arguments for social welfare are bullshit: >There are two reasons why those four risks call for social state intervention. The first is their high criticality. A risk is critical if it is highly probable: for instance, most of us are bound to get old (dying young, fortunately, remains a small probability). A risk is also critical if, however improbable, it can have a devastating impact on your life: having cancer can ruin you if you don’t have health insurance; losing your job can plunge you into a devastating spiral towards poverty, etc. By definition, criticality is probability times impact. That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention. >The other reason why these risks are not well-covered on the insurance market is that they are all affected by what economists call market imperfections. Moral hazard, a well-known imperfection, “occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks”: it plays a key role when it comes to covering the unemployment risk. This does not explain why we need state intervention. It sounds like market insurance doesn't want to cover these things for sound economic reasons, so he wants the government to cover it instead (even though it faces all of the same micro-economic problems, like moral hazard). >Another frequent imperfection on insurance markets is adverse selection: if given the choice, an insurer will refuse to cover those who present signs of a high level of risk, thus providing insurance only to those who eventually don’t need it. False. An insurer will cover a person who pays a premium that accounts for the risk. This has the economically necessary effect of encouraging people to get insurance before they get sick and need it.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> "it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison" If that's what you believe then any tax would meet the criteria and you would have to consider almost every government in the world authoritarian. Is that the case?
  - 10y ago
totalcrepe 10y ago
The French program as quoted is nothing like basic income. I've seen quite a few people just need a few bucks. The longterm risk of that and the likelihood that if they didn't get the few bucks they would need permanent safety net was sometimes pretty high. For example, I knew a vet in college who came very close to dropping out, where a few hundred bucks the safety net never knew he needed made all the difference. I can only imagine what percent of their lifetime writeoffs come from having these condescending "shutup, we know what you need" safety net systems.
wiz21c 10y ago
nobody talks about climate change here. That will affect us all.. he's right when pointing at lack of a political argument. But form me it's quite clear. The argument is : redistribution. I know it's a simplistic left-wing argument but wealth redistribution is what basic income is. And unfortunately it's way too simple. I'd prefer a complex system because it offers many places for negotiating redistribution.
transfire 10y ago
> So enough already. Grow up now, study history, and then join the liberal politicians and union activists (and some Entrepreneurs) who, while you’re playing around with that simplistic idea, are waging political battles and trying hard to imagine a new social state for the digital age. Read as "continue to serve the oligarchs who pretend to care, pandering their endless bullshit solutions that serve only their own interests". Nicolas Colin eat your own.
deleted 10y ago
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tmvphil 10y ago
This article concludes by saying the best form of state intervention is "universal [healthcare] coverage". Why not both? It is only a very small far-right minority of basic income advocates who advocate eliminating the state's role in healthcare. If the argument is simply that enacting basic income will drain the political will to defend or enhance other needed government programs, then it's not so much an argument against basic income as an argument of political priorities. I even agree that universal healthcare is a much more attainable and impactful near term target, but that doesn't mean that basic income is "bullshit".
- Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
  I wrote the article, whose point is precisely that: what I called "bullshit" is the endless "problem-solution" conversation around basic income which, in my eyes, ignores politics as well as history and drains the political will to fight on other fronts, such as universal health insurance in the US (or affordable housing).
MichaelBurge 10y ago
"We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program" - Roosevelt A Basic Income program is unrepealable after enough time(say 20 years) has passed. People are terrible at making decisions: They don't save money, they run up their credit cards, they don't invest. A BI program limits the damage that their bad decisions can cause. Even $800/month would wildly distort decision making. I don't think that a lot of people who've been receiving it their whole life are going to be in a position to function independently if you try to repeal it. There are going to be too many single mothers crying "How will I make my rent?" if you take it away. Even if they otherwise would've managed without it. A law that's a one-way ratchet requires extraordinary evidence before you even consider it. It doesn't matter if it has a positive expected value, or the models say it will probably work; the risk that it won't deliver on its promises is too high, and we'll be stuck with it forever.
blahi 10y ago
He is spot on with those "ad hominim attacks". Based on what is written on HN people in that group haven't got a clue about politics. So tell me again why that shouldn't be taken into account when judging their position?
- chillwaves 10y ago
  Do clue us in. Calling people you disagree with "clueless" is not an argument.
  - blahi 10y ago
    Only if I could. It's impossible to teach people though. You can only take from people, you can't give them anything. Especially when it comes to subtle things like politics.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't comment like this here. Coming to this community just to diss your fellow community members adds no information and is in bad taste. If you know more than others, a good way to comment is to respectfully teach them some of what you know. If you can't or don't want to do that, it might be better not to comment; certainly not to call names. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473341 and marked it off-topic. Edit: Actually, since your account has a pattern of breaking the rules here, and we've warned you multiple times before, we've banned it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12475384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12475384
jnbiche 10y ago
This guy just seems upset that people are offering up a solution to tech-related job loss that isn't with traditional welfare solution proposed by the team he cheers for. He didn't spent a lot of time offering up specific arguments against basic income, but rather on background, and the primary arguments he has are to me some of the strongest arguments for BI: 1) He worries about division and polarization. Well, BI is the only solution that I'm aware of that draws on support from both the libertarian right (strong support, mostly) and liberal left (many support, but some are suspicious like this guy). No other solution to the jobless future can boast of support from both sides of the political spectrum. 2) Oddly, the quote from Olaf Palme he offers up as a critique of basic income reads to me as strong support: "An efficient and stable welfare state must be based on universal social programs, such as health insurance, pensions, and child-support allowances-programs that are directed to all citizens. Official “poverty lines” or “means-tests” would not have to define “the poor” (which would minimize the need for bureaucratic controls). At the same time, people in difficult financial circumstances would not have to put up with the degrading classification of “poor.”" This sounds like an extremely persuasive argument for BI and one of the reasons why I support it. In fact, it's completely unclear to me after reading this whole damn essay why he is so strongly in opposition to the point where he wants people to stop discussing it altogether, other than it's not the favored solution of his team.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  > On the right is the infamous voucher system. It has been widely experimented, often with negative results, in fields such as education. The principle is to provide individuals with money and let them find providers on a lightly regulated market. Vouchers often deliver poor performance. The money distributed contributes to inflating the prices as the price elasticity of supply is negative—if only because nobody’s sure that the vouchers will last (everything depends on the next round of elections). Those with lesser means, having only the voucher to spend, are thus trapped with the worst providers (or no provider at all, despite the voucher), while the richest pay on top of the vouchers to secure access to the best offer, contributing even more to inflating prices. On the left, we find the giant social bureaucracy we are all fed up with. The quintessential bureaucratic social state is the British National Health Service (NHS). The advantage of a system such as the treasured NHS is that it guarantees everyone access to affordable and professional care providers whatever your location and your income level. The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals. On one side, it's economically unsound, and will require massive taxation to be sustainable. Otherwise, it will only work until all the Angels run out of money, then it will cause massive inflation. Mathematically, there are no other options. Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
josu 10y ago
The article is all over the place. I don't even think that we can discuss the article as a whole. Furthermore the premises and the conclusions get mixed up, and there is a lot of circular reasoning going on.
blahi 10y ago
> but I don't think things could get much worse than where we are now. I suggest reading books and history to understand how stupid what you've said is. Take that as an insult if you wish.
- glenda 10y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, however, there is no doubt an existing entitlement issue that is directly based on how much money you have. We have ALL seen this. Also, what history books are you talking about? I've read some history books but your suggestion was very unhelpful!
  - blahi 10y ago
    I suggest starting with Pillars of Earth. It is a popular book, nothing too spectacular but it will put the perspective in your "it can't be worse than what we have today" attitude.
    - glenda 10y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion. I don't believe that "things can't be worse" but rather "things could be better than what we have today"
      - blahi 10y ago
        You literary said "I don't think things could get much worse than where we are today". This is dizzyingly insulting. Do you read that right? You misunderstood things so bad that I felt physically dizzy. And that's the problem. People imagine BIG BIG BIG problems when the facts are on exactly the opposite side of the spectrum. Things are so good, that it is kind of hard to believe how good they are. Compared with the rest of the 9800 years of human history, we live in paradise. Do you understand what I'm saying? If a person magically comes to our time, he would think he is in heaven.
        13hours 10y ago
sixhobbits 10y ago
Most discussions I see about basic income (BI) fall into the same trap of conflating two very different arguments: Argument 1 looks at BI on a practical level and asks questions such as: Is BI feasible? Will it ever be feasible? Who should administer it? What would it mean for the economy? Argument 2 deals with BI more on a social level and can even be modeled as a thought experiment: What would people do if they had basic income? Would it remove the incentive to work? Would it reduce inequality? Would it offer more freedom to recipients or less? Many people (including the author of this article) make grand claims like "It's obvious that it'll fail"; "It's obvious that people will stop being productive members of society if they have BI"; "It's obvious that it's not feasible". I think that the most persuasive argument, and one advocated by the YCombinator experiment, is "We need more data". This holds true especially for argument 2 (how will people react if they received BI). Argument 1 for me is less interesting, but my rudimentary understanding of economics and politics is enough for me to be sure that anyone who declares a black-and-white position on the idea probably needs to spend some more time thinking and reading about it. No matter whether you are for or against BI, you should be happy that these experiments are being done. If you're against it, they will provide evidence that you are right and then people can "Just stop talking about it already". That's not going to happen because you wrote an overly long rant against it. If you are for BI, such experiments might confirm your hypotheses that BI will be beneficial to recipients and will allow us to move more towards argument 1 (is BI feasible? where will the money come from?).
AdrianB1 10y ago
It would be so nice if the people in favor of UBI would be the only contributors to the system, leaving everyone else to live their lives as they like. But no, UBI means everyone else needs to contribute and convincing is done by force ("you pay your taxes or go to prison, you citizen, and your tax money will be used for what we want").
- nugga 10y ago
  Doesn't the society you live in already maintain order through force? Aren't you already being taxed and the money used for whatever, including things you may find reprehensible? If UBI were to make more sense than whatever welfare maze we currently have then why not switch? Having a job or means to support yourself is not a guarantee these days, not everyone is as lucky.
  - AdrianB1 10y ago
    That's the point: the entire welfare maze does not make sense, so UBI does not either. I am not talking about maintaining order (by force or not), but about extorting people to pay from their work to give to others. There are many arguments around pro and con, some are simply ridiculous but there are around for so many time and inoculated so well, it works like a religion now: beliefs trumps reason.
WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
I'm glad this story came up. Basic Incomes sounds like a great, simple solution but it's not. Yes, welfare is an important part of our current economic system. There are people that needed it no question about it but giving it to all with no questions asked is a disaster in the making. The fact is that the only reason we endure a job day after day is that we need to get paid to pay for our needs and wants. We get up everyday and race to work not because we owe someone a favor or because we love our work but because if we don't we'll get fired and have to deal with the consequences. I would hate to live in a society where people show up to work at will. Think about it. The fireman, or name your specialist, decided not to show up today. Yikes! I can see why the idea is attractive but money is what makes the world go around. Cliche but very true! If we decide that everyone can get it and not have to work for it, we are asking for a society that loses a prime motivator to get people moving towards a career and even to get out of the house. The Utopian idea that if we don't have to work we'll be free to create a wonderful world. Is wishful thinking. All we have to do is look at what a group of rich young adults do when all their needs are filled. They become self absorbed and look to fill their own selfish wants. How many of them become nurses or doctors? Yes, rich is an extreme way to look at it, it's not "basic income" but it gives a clue to what happens when people lose a basic motivator. We are scared that technology will suck up all the jobs but if we don't have people thinking about how to get people jobs and keep them busy we are in real trouble. Basic Income does not help in the long run. Also it will never be enough. Basic needs will be fulfilled but people will always want more. One example that comes to mind is the introduction of the white phone by Apple. Apple introduced it and some people were falling over each other to get it. Not because it was white but because they could own something that others wanted. Human wants are infinite. Basic income will only create a never ending spiral that will keep people unhappy because they can't get what they want. Money is a societal tool that's used to keep society fed and safe but it has to be used correctly. Giving it away, while attractive, is not the answer.
- orangecat 10y ago
  Also it will never be enough. Basic needs will be fulfilled but people will always want more. I agree with this, and it negates your first point. Basic income is not intended to be something that you'd want to live on by default; it's just protection against hunger and homelessness. Almost everyone will want more, and they'll be unambiguously better off by increasing their earnings (unlike today: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/effective-marginal-tax-rates-for-low-income-workers-are-high http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/effective-m...).
TheRealPomax 10y ago
Kinda stopped reading when he described "the four things states are proxy insurers for", demonstrating a pretty drastic misrepresentation of how modern functional democratic social policies can be grouped and analyzed.
- Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
  How so? It's exactly the way it's grouped and organized in all European social systems. It's also the framework used by Yale University's Jacob Hacker in "The Great Risk Shift" to discuss US social policy: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Risk-Shift-Economic-Insecurity/dp/0195335341 https://www.amazon.com/Great-Risk-Shift-Economic-Insecurity/... (I wrote the Medium article)
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overgard 10y ago
Ugh, with any problem there always has to be the "well it's more complicated than that" guy who doesn't actually offer any ideas, they just toss negativity onto any proposed solution. It's always "more complicated" than that, but this line of thinking is obnoxious and pointless.
mindslight 10y ago
The primary issue with BI is that it is actually just the exact same economic policy of last the two decades, but masquerading as a social program. "Helicopter Ben" has just taken this long to design and market. The idea is basically just creating even more "stimulus" money, but distributing it just a little further from the centralized bankster cronies. Don't doubt for a second that they will still end up collecting it as rents on financialized assets (chiefly housing). Our fundamental economic problem is being in a Keynesian death spiral - now that production has gotten insanely efficient, the incentives that were forcing people to overwork are now battering those who can't find work. Turning up the treadmill even faster yet will not get us out of it!
westvaflamer 10y ago
...I'm not gonna pay for that article and I use adblocker.
caente 10y ago
I don't think UBI will fix any current welfare systems. It doesn't fix anything. It changes everything. I believe it can be done gradually. But no one should expect to preserve the status quo in long term. Any attempt to implement it should consider this: UBI will change our society forever. Hopefully for the better, but not necessarily.
taylorscollon 10y ago
I wrote a longer rebuttal to this (it's in the responses section of Colin's original piece), but here's an excerpt on the issue of political vulnerability which is his main line of attack. "It is broadly true that the more people who benefit from a government program, the more popular the program usually is. Social insurance programs that benefit the middle-class and the poor are usually politically durable. American social security, for example, is less politically vulnerable than food stamps, in part because food stamps will never benefit most middle-class people. UBI, however, is more like social security than it is like food stamps. The middle-class may not need UBI, but UBI would still benefit them. A comparable case is the status of single-payer health insurance programs in countries that have them. Most middle-class and rich people in these countries don’t need single payer healthcare — nearly all of them would have employer coverage if single payer didn’t exist. And yet there is broad support across classes for single-payer in these countries, in part because it (like UBI) benefits the middle-class. Universal healthcare is in these countries what conservatives would malign as “a sacred cow”. None of this is to say that UBI would be politically invulnerable. Even the most durable social insurance programs are often put at risk. [...] But Colin appears to think UBI would inevitably become means-tested to only benefit the poor. Financial pressures, he says, would cause voters to limit the program. But Colin doesn’t make it clear why middle-class voters would react in this way, stripping themselves of a direct cash benefit. This is certainly not typical voter behaviour, and I am skeptical that a popular turn against UBI is inevitable or likely."
sharemywin 10y ago
The problem is the math: 808+492+275+340 =1.9T/318M = 5915/yr=$497/mo so your supposed to replace: housing assistance, social security, medcaid, medicare, tuition assistance,food assistance, among others with $497/mo. Also, a strong incentive to have children without a job. Now you could not give it to children but they seem like the neediest group of people to give it to. Now you could leave out medicare and social security but now your left with 615B / 272M = $188/mo but, why bother?
andyewilliams 10y ago
I completely agree with many of the authors points. Unfortunately they make assumptions that might change dramatically. The right technology can dramatically improve matching individuals with open jobs. And since human beings are still the most cost effective source of flexibility for tasks that are not high value or high volume enough to justify automation the right technology can not only search for places where people can add value but also create them. Furthermore, in the information economy where there is no physical scarcity of materials the number of jobs that can be created is infinite. Using these facts technology can actually increase the number of jobs and the certainty of getting one ... to virtually guarantee a basic income without politically imposing one. Download "The Technology Gravity Well" free until it's September 15, 2016 launch date. http://bit.ly/2cqXU79 http://bit.ly/2cqXU79

128 points by julbaxter 10y ago

vitno 10y ago

"there’s a libertarian ideological bias in Silicon Valley that seems to turn people into ignorant morons when it comes to social state-related issues. As engineers, some don’t even get the political stakes." "So enough already. Grow up now, study history..." Regardless of the actual content of the article, I found the style of so many unnecessary ad hominim attacks offputing. The actual content of the article isn't really backed up. It mostly seems to say that engineers are seduced by the elegance of Basic Income and that they should really just focus on making the existing social system have less friction. Not a bad opinion, just not really in line with the many statements that "Basic Income won't work".

jbuzbee 10y ago
Agreed - The arrogance in the article really turned me off to what might have been some valid points. I read it as: "You simpletons don't have a clue. I know the answer to all the problems". This guy is probably a real "joy" at cocktail parties.
Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I'm certainly not the first to point out that Silicon Valley, as an ecosystem, is fundamentally uninterested in politics and history (especially social history). Would you disagree with that? I didn't write that basic income won't work as a solution designed to fix a problem. My point is that I don't see a political path to enacting it, and even though it was enacted, I don't see how it could survive the next round of election. So yes maybe it's time to focus on more winnable fights such as implementing universal health insurance. https://medium.com/@Nicolas_Colin/thanks-for-all-the-responses-399027114d12#.w99ezrg6f https://medium.com/@Nicolas_Colin/thanks-for-all-the-respons...
- dang 10y ago
  > Silicon Valley, as an ecosystem, is fundamentally uninterested in politics and history (especially social history). Would you disagree with that? Yes, for two reasons. First, the meaning of the label 'Silicon Valley' is unclear, but whatever it means, it shouldn't be anthropomorphized. Doing that is usually just a rhetorical device, and that dilutes arguments. Second, the people I know in Silicon Valley are acutely interested in those things, so I'd say your claim is way off base.
  - Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
    Thanks for replying. I'd say Silicon Valley is synonymous with tech industry here (the article effectively mentions "Silicon Valley and its satellites"). As for the second argument, I trust there is much progress in terms of tackling politics and history in SV, but many sources contributed to forming my opinion: - In "Googled" (published in 2004), Ken Auletta of the "New Yorker" explains in great detail how clueless Google initially was in dealing with Washington, DC., a trait he claims can be linked to the naïveté of engineers who see the world as a collection of "problems" all waiting for a "solution". As an engineer myself, I really recognize that engineering bias. Yet I agree the engineering culture may be stronger at Google than at other tech companies. But it's still dominant in the tech industry. - In his "Secret History of Silicon Valley" conference, Steve Blank constantly jokes about the fact that people in Silicon Valley are ignorant of history, to the point where even students at Stanford University don't have a clue about who was Frederick Terman. - More recently, another "New Yorker" article told the story of Mark Zuckerberg "getting an education" in his failed attempt to transform the education system in the state of New Jersey—see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled -In Europe most of us are appalled at how clumsy SV-based tech companies are when dealing with local governments and adapting to the various cultures, institutions, and special interests => hence the many problems that Uber, Airbnb, Google, and others have here in Europe on the regulatory front (Apple being the latest to suffer that fate with the infamous €14B European tax bill). Maybe it's a false impression. Or maybe in Silicon Valley those who are genuinely interested in geography, history, and politics are not in the executive seats and so far fail to make a difference. But I can assure you that the tech industry's passion with basic income has a direct consequence on the ground: when you try to open up the discussion about the future of social policy, the tech people's response is always: "nevermind those complex policies from the past, basic income will solve everything". Ugh. In most cases the reason is that they read the books by Peter Thiel and others, they read the blogposts by American Entrepreneurs and VCs, they believe the hype around basic income, and, I'm sorry to say, I think they don't have a clue about what it takes to build inclusive and sustainable social institutions.

SmellTheGlove 10y ago

There are some good points in here. However, what I think the author misses is that we are within reach of a post-scarcity economy, at which point all of those historical economic references go out the window (since nearly all economic theory assumes scarcity). That possibility makes a UBI experiment very worthwhile to me. I don't think we're there today or anything like that, but it may be within our lifetimes that we're seriously approaching post-scarcity. Renewables are getting cheaper, for instance, which may bring about nearly limitless cheap energy. I won't assume mass scale fusion, but we may tackle the energy issue in other ways (this is my handwaving). Food security is already within reach - most of the issues around it are political (meaning kids in Africa aren't starving because we don't have enough food). The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely. I am obviously an optimist, oversimplifying a lot, and believe that we won't nuke ourselves into oblivion. I also think that we'll eventually solve our political problems - many of which are based on energy issues. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't see an issue with UBI experiments and seeing how it goes. We shouldn't use economic theory as a reason to not try something radically different, as economic theory is wrong often enough to warrant the experiment. It may be worth a look at UBI to look at behavior on a macro level, since I think we're eventually going to get there globally and we'll need to know what the hell to do to occupy ourselves in some way that is still productive in that context.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
There will be no post-scarcity economy, or rather, if there is one, we're already living in it. People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere. The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done" It's never going to work that way. Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again. Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others? The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has? Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.

geomark 10y ago

FTA "...we have long known that technology destroys jobs..." Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
Just because it creates jobs doesn't mean it does not also destroy them. There are lots of jobs technology via automation has 'destroyed'. Some new ones were created however to write the software to automate those processes. The important thing is whether it is replacing jobs at the same rate that it is destroying them.
hk__2 10y ago
I don’t have data on that but I believe it destroys more jobs than it creates, and this is a good thing. What’s the point of automating our lives if in the end people still have to work?
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had." For an alternative view, I like the horses example in this video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
I wrote the article so I hope you'll continue reading :-) Technology destroys some jobs and it creates others, but those new jobs are numerous enough only if we put in place the right institutions (sustainable and inclusive). We're not there yet (and I don't see UBI as one of those). This is an older article about job destruction and job creation: https://salon.thefamily.co/another-100-days-a-digital-new-deal-for-workers-dd557e767df3 https://salon.thefamily.co/another-100-days-a-digital-new-de...

onli 10y ago

The article fails to present a good alternative to a basic income, or if it did I missed it. While I don't believe in that concept, I also don't think that "I think it is fair to say that being unqualified is less of a risk today" is a fair statement to make today. Tell that the steel workers whose factory just shut down, and tell them they should become entrepreneurs instead. What an arrogance!

ebalit 10y ago
I think the alternative proposed by the article is clear: use the money to provide universal services. The author also mention the fight for Obamacare as more pragmatic. I think his argument are mainly targeted at the US were universal services are lacking (or perceived as lacking).

teraflop 10y ago

> You have to fill in many papers, prove that you don’t have sufficient income or any valuable property, go through many humiliating and intrusive controls. If you want to earn (a small amount of) money without working, then you must endure it all. In most cases it is necessary to seek the help of a social worker to carry out the procedure in its entirety. Funny how the article zeroes in on this as a criticism of basic income, even though it describes the biggest way France's system is totally different from what basic income advocates are talking about.

newjersey 10y ago
> You have to fill in many papers, prove that you don’t have sufficient income or any valuable property, go through many humiliating and intrusive controls. If you want to earn (a small amount of) money without working, then you must endure it all. In most cases it is necessary to seek the help of a social worker to carry out the procedure in its entirety. This is exactly the reason I want basic income. I want nobody to feel like someone else is cheating the system. I hear a bunch of people (even old people who are on medicare and social security!) who will talk trash about "welfare queens". It is not like we can't afford it. There will be short term pain, of course but I think we will have greater solidarity. This is good for the 0.01% as well because if you are doing really well, you want to keep the ship steady. (Well to be cynical, you could try to keep everyone else fighting amongst themselves but any arsonist will tell you that a fire once started won't spare the people who started it.)
- blahi 10y ago
  And what happens in the very long term? What happens when kids are raised with the attitude that they are guaranteed to survive on basic income? What happens when their number grows? What happens when that large group feels that bare survival doesn't cut it any more and want more? What happens if the numbers actually don't pan out but scared politicians doon't want to give up power and cook the books for decades? Remember that after similar initiatives short and mid-term gains were huge, but in the long-term they lead to apathy, corruption and very uncompetitive economy. There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink. You remove the incentive to grow and guess what happens next. Or if you want to really start thinking hard, maybe you should ask yourself what happens when everybody has X in money and businesses raise their prices accordingly?

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chx 10y ago

> The leading argument is that there won’t be any jobs left anyway, and that meanwhile technology will bring all the costs down. Oh there will be many jobs left but they will all require a certain level of education, let's call that university degree for the sake of simplicity. Also people will need to have some degree of mental capacity to attain this level. It is pretty much natural to presume not everyone will have this mental capacity. Already this is showing everywhere. What will society do with those who have the physical capability but not the mental to work? BI is one of the answers. It may not be the best answer but do have a better one? We need an answer right effin' now because long range trucking will be automated away Real Soon Now(TM) and that's (at least in Canada) is one of the most populated occupation and society level answers are never reached quick.

jrbapna 10y ago

A quick look at humanities progress, and its fairly obvious where we're headed. there will be a day where many people won't have to work to survive. There will be an extreme amount of abundance in the economy due to technology and automation. More for everyone... :) Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.

jkot 10y ago

How about immigration? Once Basic Income is introduced in one area, people from all over the world will start moving there. Right now SF is not even capable to host 450 homeless arriving every year. What would you do if that number of people arrived every day or every hour?

daenney 10y ago
> people from all over the world will start moving there. I don't think immigration laws would permit that. For one, you couldn't "just move" to the US like that. Within the EU it could become an interesting problem if some countries did this and others didn't. I suspect that if anyone were to try this there'll be some limitations at first, like you have to have citizenship, or prove legal residency for longer than "since the past few minutes".
- jkot 10y ago
  But that would not be really basic income (which is unconditional). There would be second class of citizens. Something like controlled rent today.
  - TillE 10y ago
    I can't vote in Germany. I'm not a "second class of citizen", I'm literally not a citizen.
    - jkot 10y ago
      But you are "citizen enough" to pay taxes or receive social benefits. And some non-citizens can vote in Germany. Anyway, by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it.
      - chillwaves 10y ago
        > by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it. Doesn't have to be. Some versions are, some aren't. Given we are talking about a system that does not exist, not sure why you say it is one thing or the other. Some versions give to minors, some do not. Some only give to citizens in good standing (no felons). Conditions can exist and should exist in my opinion.

Dwolb 10y ago

Side note: are there platforms that make responding to essays easier for the writer and reader to follow the logic? It'd help for replying to pieces like the OP. I struggled with this example on the RMI/RSA in France. >So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. The author holds this example up as why UBI might fail. But the reasons listed why the RMI/RSA failed are all either driving forces for UBI or solved by UBI. 1) RMI/RSA is complicated to administer due to high burden of proof for the individual to demonstrate no income. UBI solves this by allowing everyone to have an income, not just those without a salary. 2) RMI/RSA has adverse economic effects because it disincentivizes people to seek jobs. Part of why people are thinking UBI could be a good idea is there will be fewer jobs in the future and so disincentivization to look for a job for a subset of the population is partially a good thing. 3) RMI/RSA is politically difficult. That's why people involved in the UBI movement are running private, small scale experiments. They want to prove/disprove their hypotheses to provide evidence in favor of or against UBI.

wilwade 10y ago

A reasonable article, albeit not capturing the full argument for UBI. One missing pro-argument is reducing the creativity monetary risk barrier. Entrepreneurship is at about 14% working age adults in the US (1). I would say that the number of people who would be entrepreneurs is higher, but limited by risk. Entrepreneurship is very high risk. Reducing that risk would enable more people to become entrepreneurs (a good thing). Removing the risk that being an entrepreneur will make you loose the shirt off your back, will allow more people to start companies. It is not limited to entrepreneurship. How many more amazing painters would there be? Writers? How much more creative common good would there be in the world if basic needs (via UBI) was taken care of? None of the current social risk insurance, are directly reducing this loss to us all. (1) http://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reaches-record-highs.html http://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reache...

Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
I wrote the article. Thank your for your response. I get your point about painters and writers. But my guess is that working on affordable housing would do more good on that front—and would be more sustainable politically. You can read this convincing article by Sarah Kendzior: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-cities-are-killing-creativity-2013121065856922461.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-c...
- arielb1 10y ago
  So the problem with San Fransisco is too much people chasing not enough houses, and your solution is to pay people to buy houses?

k-mcgrady 10y ago

There is a lot in this article I disagree with but let me focus on the NHS argument. >> "The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals." The only reason this is a problem is political. We have the NHS but we also have private options - get rid of those. Then there would be more staff available for the NHS, a huge some of money would not be wasted on locum staff, and therefore more money would be available to the NHS. Some of that could be used for funding and some could be used to pay staff a fairer wage. The fiscal austerity argument is nonsense. We have plenty of money - it's just spent poorly. We don't need to spend £30bn on nuclear missiles we'll never use (and if we ever do need to use them it'll be too late anyway). We don't need to spend £30-40bn on the military. Of course defunding these things is political suicide but you can't tell me we can't afford decent healthcare when we're wasting money on missiles we don't need, a huge military we don't need, and locum staff which shouldn't be a thing in the first place when you have a public health care system.

bko 10y ago
So the solution to poor service provided by NHS is to eliminate any competitors and force more people onto NHS hoping that this improves the service?
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Yes. The amount of money locum staff get is incredible. I know a doctor who exclusively does locum work - he works 3 months a year and has more than enough money to spend the rest of the time travelling. If you eliminate private health care you eliminate that cost and you are the only employer. Edit: To clarify this as it seems like a very unpopular opinion around these parts: a public system isn't going to work in a free/competitive market. I think we need to either go all in on a public system or all in on a private system. When you land somewhere in the middle it just doesn't work.

JabavuAdams 10y ago

Interesting article, and a good mind-expanding summary of various options and history. TL/DR: > Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.

AdrianB1 10y ago
I live in a country that has a flat rate tax system. Not a flat tax (as in "equal amount for all taxpayers"), but a flat percentage. The overall tax rate in my country is about double than US and the life quality is worse. Go figure :)

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Fascinating that he picks Blair's Fabian speech as an example of the NHS being a thorn in government's side. I didn't vote for Blair, or support many of his policies, but his governance utterly transformed the NHS for the better. It was adequately funded for the first time in a couple of decades, at the time of this speech, and they were now searching for ways to measurably improve care, especially in comparatively neglected areas such as mental health. Quality goes down when governments start bringing political ideology to the fore - eg "we must bring the efficiency of the market to the NHS" neatly ignores the fact the NHS is actually pretty damn efficient, and is one of the strongest buyers on the planet getting significantly better pricing from all the drug companies. Adding managers and market aspects actually worsened this. The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI. I'm starting to doubt everything he's written by this point.

1024core 10y ago
> The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI. Read the article again. His point is that the RMI (RSA) is what they ended up with, even though they wanted (started with) something similar to UBI.
- ebalit 10y ago
  No, they did not start with a UBI. RMI was means tested from the start. The RSA was a reform intended to "smooth the edges". While you would lose you're RMI as soon as you start working, now you can keep part of the RSA during a transition period. But the problem with RSA is that it's really complex and most people still don't get it. And it's a lot of paperware for a relatively small amount of money. I think France is actually one of the best place to start a real UBI scheme. Our system is close to UBI but probably the worst implementation possible, with a lot of edge cases. This proposal details a complete reform of our tax system around a UBI: http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09-15_MdeBasquiat.pdf http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09...
Nicolas_Colin 10y ago

aminok 10y ago

Basic Income (aka universal welfare) is bullshit because it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are confined like captive animals, so that the rest of the population is cowed into handing over the demanded amount. Likewise, the author's arguments for social welfare are bullshit: >There are two reasons why those four risks call for social state intervention. The first is their high criticality. A risk is critical if it is highly probable: for instance, most of us are bound to get old (dying young, fortunately, remains a small probability). A risk is also critical if, however improbable, it can have a devastating impact on your life: having cancer can ruin you if you don’t have health insurance; losing your job can plunge you into a devastating spiral towards poverty, etc. By definition, criticality is probability times impact. That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention. >The other reason why these risks are not well-covered on the insurance market is that they are all affected by what economists call market imperfections. Moral hazard, a well-known imperfection, “occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks”: it plays a key role when it comes to covering the unemployment risk. This does not explain why we need state intervention. It sounds like market insurance doesn't want to cover these things for sound economic reasons, so he wants the government to cover it instead (even though it faces all of the same micro-economic problems, like moral hazard). >Another frequent imperfection on insurance markets is adverse selection: if given the choice, an insurer will refuse to cover those who present signs of a high level of risk, thus providing insurance only to those who eventually don’t need it. False. An insurer will cover a person who pays a premium that accounts for the risk. This has the economically necessary effect of encouraging people to get insurance before they get sick and need it.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> "it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison" If that's what you believe then any tax would meet the criteria and you would have to consider almost every government in the world authoritarian. Is that the case?
- 10y ago

totalcrepe 10y ago

The French program as quoted is nothing like basic income. I've seen quite a few people just need a few bucks. The longterm risk of that and the likelihood that if they didn't get the few bucks they would need permanent safety net was sometimes pretty high. For example, I knew a vet in college who came very close to dropping out, where a few hundred bucks the safety net never knew he needed made all the difference. I can only imagine what percent of their lifetime writeoffs come from having these condescending "shutup, we know what you need" safety net systems.

wiz21c 10y ago

nobody talks about climate change here. That will affect us all.. he's right when pointing at lack of a political argument. But form me it's quite clear. The argument is : redistribution. I know it's a simplistic left-wing argument but wealth redistribution is what basic income is. And unfortunately it's way too simple. I'd prefer a complex system because it offers many places for negotiating redistribution.

transfire 10y ago

> So enough already. Grow up now, study history, and then join the liberal politicians and union activists (and some Entrepreneurs) who, while you’re playing around with that simplistic idea, are waging political battles and trying hard to imagine a new social state for the digital age. Read as "continue to serve the oligarchs who pretend to care, pandering their endless bullshit solutions that serve only their own interests". Nicolas Colin eat your own.

deleted 10y ago

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tmvphil 10y ago

This article concludes by saying the best form of state intervention is "universal [healthcare] coverage". Why not both? It is only a very small far-right minority of basic income advocates who advocate eliminating the state's role in healthcare. If the argument is simply that enacting basic income will drain the political will to defend or enhance other needed government programs, then it's not so much an argument against basic income as an argument of political priorities. I even agree that universal healthcare is a much more attainable and impactful near term target, but that doesn't mean that basic income is "bullshit".

Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
I wrote the article, whose point is precisely that: what I called "bullshit" is the endless "problem-solution" conversation around basic income which, in my eyes, ignores politics as well as history and drains the political will to fight on other fronts, such as universal health insurance in the US (or affordable housing).

MichaelBurge 10y ago

"We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program" - Roosevelt A Basic Income program is unrepealable after enough time(say 20 years) has passed. People are terrible at making decisions: They don't save money, they run up their credit cards, they don't invest. A BI program limits the damage that their bad decisions can cause. Even $800/month would wildly distort decision making. I don't think that a lot of people who've been receiving it their whole life are going to be in a position to function independently if you try to repeal it. There are going to be too many single mothers crying "How will I make my rent?" if you take it away. Even if they otherwise would've managed without it. A law that's a one-way ratchet requires extraordinary evidence before you even consider it. It doesn't matter if it has a positive expected value, or the models say it will probably work; the risk that it won't deliver on its promises is too high, and we'll be stuck with it forever.

blahi 10y ago

He is spot on with those "ad hominim attacks". Based on what is written on HN people in that group haven't got a clue about politics. So tell me again why that shouldn't be taken into account when judging their position?

chillwaves 10y ago
Do clue us in. Calling people you disagree with "clueless" is not an argument.
- blahi 10y ago
  Only if I could. It's impossible to teach people though. You can only take from people, you can't give them anything. Especially when it comes to subtle things like politics.
dang 10y ago
Please don't comment like this here. Coming to this community just to diss your fellow community members adds no information and is in bad taste. If you know more than others, a good way to comment is to respectfully teach them some of what you know. If you can't or don't want to do that, it might be better not to comment; certainly not to call names. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473341 and marked it off-topic. Edit: Actually, since your account has a pattern of breaking the rules here, and we've warned you multiple times before, we've banned it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12475384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12475384

jnbiche 10y ago

This guy just seems upset that people are offering up a solution to tech-related job loss that isn't with traditional welfare solution proposed by the team he cheers for. He didn't spent a lot of time offering up specific arguments against basic income, but rather on background, and the primary arguments he has are to me some of the strongest arguments for BI: 1) He worries about division and polarization. Well, BI is the only solution that I'm aware of that draws on support from both the libertarian right (strong support, mostly) and liberal left (many support, but some are suspicious like this guy). No other solution to the jobless future can boast of support from both sides of the political spectrum. 2) Oddly, the quote from Olaf Palme he offers up as a critique of basic income reads to me as strong support: "An efficient and stable welfare state must be based on universal social programs, such as health insurance, pensions, and child-support allowances-programs that are directed to all citizens. Official “poverty lines” or “means-tests” would not have to define “the poor” (which would minimize the need for bureaucratic controls). At the same time, people in difficult financial circumstances would not have to put up with the degrading classification of “poor.”" This sounds like an extremely persuasive argument for BI and one of the reasons why I support it. In fact, it's completely unclear to me after reading this whole damn essay why he is so strongly in opposition to the point where he wants people to stop discussing it altogether, other than it's not the favored solution of his team.

stephengillie 10y ago
> On the right is the infamous voucher system. It has been widely experimented, often with negative results, in fields such as education. The principle is to provide individuals with money and let them find providers on a lightly regulated market. Vouchers often deliver poor performance. The money distributed contributes to inflating the prices as the price elasticity of supply is negative—if only because nobody’s sure that the vouchers will last (everything depends on the next round of elections). Those with lesser means, having only the voucher to spend, are thus trapped with the worst providers (or no provider at all, despite the voucher), while the richest pay on top of the vouchers to secure access to the best offer, contributing even more to inflating prices. On the left, we find the giant social bureaucracy we are all fed up with. The quintessential bureaucratic social state is the British National Health Service (NHS). The advantage of a system such as the treasured NHS is that it guarantees everyone access to affordable and professional care providers whatever your location and your income level. The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals. On one side, it's economically unsound, and will require massive taxation to be sustainable. Otherwise, it will only work until all the Angels run out of money, then it will cause massive inflation. Mathematically, there are no other options. Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.

josu 10y ago

The article is all over the place. I don't even think that we can discuss the article as a whole. Furthermore the premises and the conclusions get mixed up, and there is a lot of circular reasoning going on.

blahi 10y ago

> but I don't think things could get much worse than where we are now. I suggest reading books and history to understand how stupid what you've said is. Take that as an insult if you wish.

glenda 10y ago
I understand where you're coming from, however, there is no doubt an existing entitlement issue that is directly based on how much money you have. We have ALL seen this. Also, what history books are you talking about? I've read some history books but your suggestion was very unhelpful!
- blahi 10y ago
  I suggest starting with Pillars of Earth. It is a popular book, nothing too spectacular but it will put the perspective in your "it can't be worse than what we have today" attitude.
  - glenda 10y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. I don't believe that "things can't be worse" but rather "things could be better than what we have today"
    - blahi 10y ago
      You literary said "I don't think things could get much worse than where we are today". This is dizzyingly insulting. Do you read that right? You misunderstood things so bad that I felt physically dizzy. And that's the problem. People imagine BIG BIG BIG problems when the facts are on exactly the opposite side of the spectrum. Things are so good, that it is kind of hard to believe how good they are. Compared with the rest of the 9800 years of human history, we live in paradise. Do you understand what I'm saying? If a person magically comes to our time, he would think he is in heaven.
      - 13hours 10y ago

sixhobbits 10y ago

Most discussions I see about basic income (BI) fall into the same trap of conflating two very different arguments: Argument 1 looks at BI on a practical level and asks questions such as: Is BI feasible? Will it ever be feasible? Who should administer it? What would it mean for the economy? Argument 2 deals with BI more on a social level and can even be modeled as a thought experiment: What would people do if they had basic income? Would it remove the incentive to work? Would it reduce inequality? Would it offer more freedom to recipients or less? Many people (including the author of this article) make grand claims like "It's obvious that it'll fail"; "It's obvious that people will stop being productive members of society if they have BI"; "It's obvious that it's not feasible". I think that the most persuasive argument, and one advocated by the YCombinator experiment, is "We need more data". This holds true especially for argument 2 (how will people react if they received BI). Argument 1 for me is less interesting, but my rudimentary understanding of economics and politics is enough for me to be sure that anyone who declares a black-and-white position on the idea probably needs to spend some more time thinking and reading about it. No matter whether you are for or against BI, you should be happy that these experiments are being done. If you're against it, they will provide evidence that you are right and then people can "Just stop talking about it already". That's not going to happen because you wrote an overly long rant against it. If you are for BI, such experiments might confirm your hypotheses that BI will be beneficial to recipients and will allow us to move more towards argument 1 (is BI feasible? where will the money come from?).

AdrianB1 10y ago

It would be so nice if the people in favor of UBI would be the only contributors to the system, leaving everyone else to live their lives as they like. But no, UBI means everyone else needs to contribute and convincing is done by force ("you pay your taxes or go to prison, you citizen, and your tax money will be used for what we want").

nugga 10y ago
Doesn't the society you live in already maintain order through force? Aren't you already being taxed and the money used for whatever, including things you may find reprehensible? If UBI were to make more sense than whatever welfare maze we currently have then why not switch? Having a job or means to support yourself is not a guarantee these days, not everyone is as lucky.
- AdrianB1 10y ago
  That's the point: the entire welfare maze does not make sense, so UBI does not either. I am not talking about maintaining order (by force or not), but about extorting people to pay from their work to give to others. There are many arguments around pro and con, some are simply ridiculous but there are around for so many time and inoculated so well, it works like a religion now: beliefs trumps reason.

WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

I'm glad this story came up. Basic Incomes sounds like a great, simple solution but it's not. Yes, welfare is an important part of our current economic system. There are people that needed it no question about it but giving it to all with no questions asked is a disaster in the making. The fact is that the only reason we endure a job day after day is that we need to get paid to pay for our needs and wants. We get up everyday and race to work not because we owe someone a favor or because we love our work but because if we don't we'll get fired and have to deal with the consequences. I would hate to live in a society where people show up to work at will. Think about it. The fireman, or name your specialist, decided not to show up today. Yikes! I can see why the idea is attractive but money is what makes the world go around. Cliche but very true! If we decide that everyone can get it and not have to work for it, we are asking for a society that loses a prime motivator to get people moving towards a career and even to get out of the house. The Utopian idea that if we don't have to work we'll be free to create a wonderful world. Is wishful thinking. All we have to do is look at what a group of rich young adults do when all their needs are filled. They become self absorbed and look to fill their own selfish wants. How many of them become nurses or doctors? Yes, rich is an extreme way to look at it, it's not "basic income" but it gives a clue to what happens when people lose a basic motivator. We are scared that technology will suck up all the jobs but if we don't have people thinking about how to get people jobs and keep them busy we are in real trouble. Basic Income does not help in the long run. Also it will never be enough. Basic needs will be fulfilled but people will always want more. One example that comes to mind is the introduction of the white phone by Apple. Apple introduced it and some people were falling over each other to get it. Not because it was white but because they could own something that others wanted. Human wants are infinite. Basic income will only create a never ending spiral that will keep people unhappy because they can't get what they want. Money is a societal tool that's used to keep society fed and safe but it has to be used correctly. Giving it away, while attractive, is not the answer.

orangecat 10y ago
Also it will never be enough. Basic needs will be fulfilled but people will always want more. I agree with this, and it negates your first point. Basic income is not intended to be something that you'd want to live on by default; it's just protection against hunger and homelessness. Almost everyone will want more, and they'll be unambiguously better off by increasing their earnings (unlike today: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/effective-marginal-tax-rates-for-low-income-workers-are-high http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/effective-m...).

TheRealPomax 10y ago

Kinda stopped reading when he described "the four things states are proxy insurers for", demonstrating a pretty drastic misrepresentation of how modern functional democratic social policies can be grouped and analyzed.

Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
How so? It's exactly the way it's grouped and organized in all European social systems. It's also the framework used by Yale University's Jacob Hacker in "The Great Risk Shift" to discuss US social policy: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Risk-Shift-Economic-Insecurity/dp/0195335341 https://www.amazon.com/Great-Risk-Shift-Economic-Insecurity/... (I wrote the Medium article)

deleted 10y ago

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overgard 10y ago

Ugh, with any problem there always has to be the "well it's more complicated than that" guy who doesn't actually offer any ideas, they just toss negativity onto any proposed solution. It's always "more complicated" than that, but this line of thinking is obnoxious and pointless.

mindslight 10y ago

The primary issue with BI is that it is actually just the exact same economic policy of last the two decades, but masquerading as a social program. "Helicopter Ben" has just taken this long to design and market. The idea is basically just creating even more "stimulus" money, but distributing it just a little further from the centralized bankster cronies. Don't doubt for a second that they will still end up collecting it as rents on financialized assets (chiefly housing). Our fundamental economic problem is being in a Keynesian death spiral - now that production has gotten insanely efficient, the incentives that were forcing people to overwork are now battering those who can't find work. Turning up the treadmill even faster yet will not get us out of it!

westvaflamer 10y ago

...I'm not gonna pay for that article and I use adblocker.

caente 10y ago

I don't think UBI will fix any current welfare systems. It doesn't fix anything. It changes everything. I believe it can be done gradually. But no one should expect to preserve the status quo in long term. Any attempt to implement it should consider this: UBI will change our society forever. Hopefully for the better, but not necessarily.

taylorscollon 10y ago

I wrote a longer rebuttal to this (it's in the responses section of Colin's original piece), but here's an excerpt on the issue of political vulnerability which is his main line of attack. "It is broadly true that the more people who benefit from a government program, the more popular the program usually is. Social insurance programs that benefit the middle-class and the poor are usually politically durable. American social security, for example, is less politically vulnerable than food stamps, in part because food stamps will never benefit most middle-class people. UBI, however, is more like social security than it is like food stamps. The middle-class may not need UBI, but UBI would still benefit them. A comparable case is the status of single-payer health insurance programs in countries that have them. Most middle-class and rich people in these countries don’t need single payer healthcare — nearly all of them would have employer coverage if single payer didn’t exist. And yet there is broad support across classes for single-payer in these countries, in part because it (like UBI) benefits the middle-class. Universal healthcare is in these countries what conservatives would malign as “a sacred cow”. None of this is to say that UBI would be politically invulnerable. Even the most durable social insurance programs are often put at risk. [...] But Colin appears to think UBI would inevitably become means-tested to only benefit the poor. Financial pressures, he says, would cause voters to limit the program. But Colin doesn’t make it clear why middle-class voters would react in this way, stripping themselves of a direct cash benefit. This is certainly not typical voter behaviour, and I am skeptical that a popular turn against UBI is inevitable or likely."

sharemywin 10y ago

The problem is the math: 808+492+275+340 =1.9T/318M = 5915/yr=$497/mo so your supposed to replace: housing assistance, social security, medcaid, medicare, tuition assistance,food assistance, among others with $497/mo. Also, a strong incentive to have children without a job. Now you could not give it to children but they seem like the neediest group of people to give it to. Now you could leave out medicare and social security but now your left with 615B / 272M = $188/mo but, why bother?

andyewilliams 10y ago

I completely agree with many of the authors points. Unfortunately they make assumptions that might change dramatically. The right technology can dramatically improve matching individuals with open jobs. And since human beings are still the most cost effective source of flexibility for tasks that are not high value or high volume enough to justify automation the right technology can not only search for places where people can add value but also create them. Furthermore, in the information economy where there is no physical scarcity of materials the number of jobs that can be created is infinite. Using these facts technology can actually increase the number of jobs and the certainty of getting one ... to virtually guarantee a basic income without politically imposing one. Download "The Technology Gravity Well" free until it's September 15, 2016 launch date. http://bit.ly/2cqXU79 http://bit.ly/2cqXU79