9 ms·

Hiring for Basic Income

83 points by mattkrisiloff 10y ago

minimaxir 10y ago
Shouldn't this be posted in the Who is Hiring thread instead? :P
thedogeye 10y ago
Sweet! Where can I sign up to receive my basic income?
Tycho 10y ago
Apologies if this has been discussed extensively. But it occurs to me that the US (and maybe other Western countries) has a retirement crisis - ie. people have not saved nearly enough for their retirement, and state-related pensions/entitlements are a massive strain on the budgets. So with that in mind, how the heck can these countries even consider rolling out a new "basic income" program? Doesn't this seem a bit incongruous?
- dsr_ 10y ago
  Basic income would solve that problem too, by replacing the state pension programs. (The US has very few real pension programs any more, since the 401(k) and IRA systems were put into effect and displaced them.)
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    I don't see this happening. Basic income will be a terribly spartan existence (I estimate not more than $650/person/month with pretty generous guessestimating). Anyone who works for the government (including teaching & military) with retirement benefits is not going to subsist on just UBI once they stop working.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      This all depends on how many jobs are displaced due to automation, if 40% of our workforce ends up unemployed due to robots taking over their jobs it doesn't seem unreasonable to take 30% of the GDP to supply a BI program (which would give roughly 1/2 the median income to each person in the country if my math was right).
      - sokoloff 10y ago
        Do away with minimum wage laws (no longer needed and no longer desirable with a UBI program in place, IMO), and 40% of the workforce won't end up unemployed/unemployable.
        snuxoll 10y ago
        I'm fine with eliminating the minimum wage in a society with a UBI, wokers will be able to compete purely on value and wages will reflect as much - but the UBI needs to actually be a livable amount and not below current poverty / minimum wage levels.
      - sokoloff 10y ago
        30% of GDP is almost double[1] the entire federal tax receipts currently. That means you're going to need to raise taxes to between 2x and 2.5x their current level in order to institute a program of that magnitude. That does meet my bar of "unreasonable". [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
        Scarblac 10y ago
        He's talking about a scenario where 40% is unemployed due to automation, that's pretty apocalyptic. If that can be dealt with pretty well with only a 2.5x raise in tax levels, that sounds good to me.
        sokoloff 10y ago
        Taking federal taxes to 2.5x their current levels takes the top marginal rate over 100%, and that's before any state or local taxes are added. Mathematically, that makes no sense.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Basic income would solve that problem too, by replacing the state pension programs. This doesn't actually fit very well with the conceptual basis of UBI as a replacement for means-tested benefit programs, as defined-benefit pensions are not means-tested benefits. Though its true that a number (though not all) UBI proponents have either explicitly called for replacing existing Social Security-style retirement programs, or implicitly suggested that by including the existing cost of those programs as funds available for UBI.
- Tarrosion 10y ago
  Part of the idea is that with a basic income, there's no longer a need for many "social safety net" programs: disability, social security, food stamps, medicaid, etc. The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income. I'm not sure if this is true or not. You can find serious people with reasonable seeming numbers on both sides of that argument.
  - eanzenberg 10y ago
    Right.. Basic income essentially wants to take mone out of the pot currently reserved for the needy and disabled, and distribute it to able-bodied people who choose not to enter the work force.
    - RyanZAG 10y ago
      I believe the basic idea is to use that able-bodied distribution as an excuse to heavily raise taxes, with the goal being that the needy and disabled would not receive less. The logic being that if everyone has a safety net, we don't need to reward people as much since they now have lower risk. Personally I don't believe that would actually happen, but the idea does account for that angle.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      There's nothing inherently wrong with not entering the workforce in the post-scarcity society we are rapidly approaching. People can instead choose to spend time raising their children, practicing a hobby, or trying to start their own business without fear of not being able to support themselves. Most humans naturally don't want to sidle idle all their lives, some will, but the vast majority will find some productive use of their time - a basic income means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours.
      - sfeng 10y ago
        The conflict here is that humans are animals, and animals evolved to use the minimum amount of energy possible to satisfy their needs. Yes you can learn the reward of willfully working hard, but I'm not sure whether everyone, or even most people, will make that transition.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  This is Y Combinator giving people money, not a state actor. It is probably(or should be) unconstitutional for the US to provide basic income, though the state of California might be able to.
  - wmf 10y ago
    The production version of basic income is clearly government-based. YC is doing a private beta to decide whether to lobby governments to provide basic income.
  - stevens32 10y ago
    What's the argument for basic income through government being unconstitutional?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Basic income (including its funding stream) can be implemented as an income tax with a fixed refundable credit per qualified individual [0], so its unmistakably exactly as Constitutional as federal income tax. [0] E.g., if you decide that the UBI goes to all adult citizens and legal permanent residents, then that's the population that gets the credit.
    - MichaelBurge 10y ago
      They certainly have the power to collect the tax money required, and the Social Security SCOTUS case(Helvering v. Davis) sets a pretty good starting point for their power to spend. I'd argue that while they have the power to spend the money on a wide variety of social programs(per the General Welfare clause), they don't have the power to redistribute income since it doesn't have a designated purpose. Spending is an exchange of money for services or goods, while UBI would just be an exchange of money. Even if redistribution was considered a type of spending, the case mentions specific facts that harmed the elderly(employee age limits being the main one). If these mattered to the original case, then giving UBI to young people who choose not to work should be a weaker case, which makes it reasonable for SCOTUS to disagree at least on those examples. Social Security is a combination of a forced retirement savings plan and a delayed redistribution of income. I don't know if anyone has argued that the redistribution part alone is unconstitutional, but the forced savings part comes from the payout increasing as you put more money in. A UBI would be entirely a redistribution. A similar argument might apply to cases where the EITC causes a net benefit to be given to someone, but: A. The government could argue that the EITC is intended to benefit the poor, which seems similar to arguing that Social Security benefits the elderly and B. I don't know if anyone has standing to bring a suit, since those cases are probably rare and the damages would be small.
- thedevil 10y ago
  I have the same concern. I've heard arguments, but none that adequately address the issue. While I'm a fan of the idea of adopting basic income eventually, I don't see how we can fund it now without serious negative consequences. Unfortunately the studies I've read about here on HN (including this one I'm guessing) seem to only address the positive side without actually comparing costs vs benefits.
  - 3pt14159 10y ago
    Every time I do the math for BI people I never get upvotes, so it never gets attention. Yes, one day in the far future basic income will work, but right now even assuming nobody that is currently working will stop working, it will cost a _ton_ of money. Especially from the top part of the tax bracket.
    - mercutio2 10y ago
      Great! That's the point. People in my tax bracket should be paying vastly more in taxes. People who lobby for basic income certainly shouldn't pussyfoot around the notion that it's fundamentally a redistributive tax. My goal is to eliminate poverty for US citizens who don't insist on living in extremely high cost areas. Secondary goals are to enable the poor to refuse to do bullshit jobs, and undermine the deeply-held notion that wage work is ennobling. The only way to achieve such redistribution is now, as it has always been, to tax rich people like me.
      - 3pt14159 10y ago
        Hey I'm there with you. I'd rather people in the 1% pay 80% taxes instead of 40% taxes, but the reality is that very, very, very few people in the 1% think like we do, and a good number people in the upper middle class and middle class are going to be worse off as well. It's obviously the long term solution, but it's not politically palatable yet.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > So with that in mind, how the heck can these countries even consider rolling out a new "basic income" program? Unconditional income programs (whether they meet basic needs or not) are conceived of as replacing some or all existing means-tested benefit programs, and reducing or eliminating the adverse employment effects of minimum wage laws (without eliminating the income-floor effects of those same laws). They can be budget neutral by either being cost neutral (redirecting funds from the displaced programs) or by being tied to specific new funding sources. (Given that one of the long-term goals is to address long-term concentration of economic gains in capital rather than labor, capital-specific income or ad valorem taxation is the natural place to look for dedicated new revenue streams.)
  - Tycho 10y ago
    How can they be cost neutral? That would only happen if by luck the same number of people applied to basic income as previously applied for means-tested benefits. I find this scenario unlikely! Also, even if you have some new funding source, the system would have potentially huge liabilities if lots of people decide to sign up for it. Given that we can barely manage pensions, which I suspect have more stable characteristics than the hypothetical distribution of basic income requests, I'm skeptical that we could successfully manage a basic income program.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > How can they be cost neutral? That's literally exactly what the GP post explains. If the funds distributed as UBI are the funds redirected from replaced programs, the costs are, by definition, the same. > That would only happen if by luck the same number of people applied to basic income as previously applied for means-tested benefits. No, it wouldn't. You are assuming equal per beneficiary per time period total benefit + administrative costs. > Also, even if you have some new funding source, the system would have potentially huge liabilities if lots of people decide to sign up for it. No, its not dependent on people who "decide to sign up for" since, by definition, an unconditional income is given unconditionally to every member of the target population; that's part of the basic calculation of the benefit that can be given at any funding level.
- koolba 10y ago
  Nonsense. Since when did not having money to pay existing obligations stop lawmakers from legislating new unpaid handouts?
thedogeye 10y ago
The cost of basic income in the United States is about equal to the cost of getting us off permanently off of fossil fuels. This is going to send heads spinning as we decide which one we care about more, poverty or the environment.
- WaxProlix 10y ago
  Sashimi and gyoza cost about the same amount but I had both for lunch yesterday.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  Getting permanently off fossil fuels is a one-off cost. Basic income is an ever increasing and perpetual cost. I don't think they are comparable.
zaguios 10y ago
For anyone who is interested, I actually recently started a basic income experiment of my own. You can check it out here: https://www.swiftdemand.com/ https://www.swiftdemand.com/ Essentially the way that it works is that anyone who signs up will receive 100 coins each day and they may be freely traded among users. Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work. If anyone has any questions or suggestions relating to the service I would love to discuss them.
- wehadfun 10y ago
  How is the experiment going. Are people using this yet?
  - zaguios 10y ago
    You can check out some information on the stats page: https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats I actually only released the website less than a week ago so it's still incredibly new, but people have already done some cool stuff with it. This guy set up a website to write haikus in exchange for coins http://swiftpoetry.club/ http://swiftpoetry.club/ I'm planning on setting up a service to allow people to more easily exchange coins into their local countries currency and develop an API so websites can more easily accept Swift Demand as a payment option, but these things are still in the pipeline.
  - wehadfun 10y ago
    Pretty cool! Any plan to open source this thing or give it to community. Would not want to do anything substantial for a swiftcoin if there is a concern that they could be taken away or lost or something.
- literallycancer 10y ago
  >Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work. How is this going to happen?
cpursley 10y ago
> Hiring for Basic Income So much irony in just four words. I love it.
selllikesybok 10y ago
Might want to fix this -> https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-rhodes/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-rhodes/
- craigcannon 10y ago
  Fixed. Thanks for the heads-up!
  - selllikesybok 10y ago
    Hmm, Elizabeth's author profile still show's Matt's info, for me...
desireco42 10y ago
It is really cowardly to use throwaway account when posting.
- hnbroseph 10y ago
  ...and? cowards are people too.
- withdavidli 10y ago
  500+ days old and 877 karma. Doesn't look like a throwaway. Maybe just an ironic name.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13708932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13708932 and marked it off-topic.
- desireco42 10y ago
  It is off topic, sorry moderators. It seems whenever someone wants to say something a little bit controversial or not as mainstream, they use throwaway account. And I think this is not fair. I noticed this in number of discussions. And people like to throw opinions but don't stand behind them.
amelius 10y ago
I suppose that one good way to research BI is by making the national lotteries provide a prize that basically corresponds to a BI, and then make sure that participants agree to partake in the research (e.g., surveys).
andrewla 10y ago
One alternative to unconditional basic income would be an presence-based minimum wage. The idea would be not only to replace welfare and social security and other conditional income sources but also replace the idea of the minimum wage with a funded mandate. I'm not sure where this idea came from, though I believe I heard it attributed to Milton Friedman (though I've not been able to find a reference). The idea would be to have an auditorium, where you would come in and sit and do nothing, and be paid the minimum wage when you leave based only on the amount of time you spent in the room. Individuals would be free to accept wages lower than the minimum wage for outside jobs, but employers would have to compete with that minimum wage for employees, so any lower wages offered would have to compete in other aspects -- pensions, tips, benefits, opportunities for advancement, etc. Because this would require physical presence, it would naturally be self-limiting in some aspects of abuse; you can "sit" as many or as few hours as you wish, but you cannot use that time for other productive work, so there's a natural fall-off of benefits as you choose to work instead (rather than an artificial administrative "cliff"). There are other aspects which seem very vulnerable to abuse -- why not just sleep there, what about doing remote work on a laptop, what about setting up shop and selling hot dogs in the room, etc. And there are some aspects which seem logistically problematic -- how do people commute to the room, how many rooms do you need, what about people who have disabilities that prevent them from travelling, etc. But generally all of these seem addressable, and some of them might just be self-regulating by social norms, so that there is a small but acceptable amount of leakage due to abuse. It seems administrative simpler in some regards than UBI, in that the uniqueness of a recipient is more easily enforceable, and it doesn't just change the y-intercept of the income curve, but rather semi-truncates it, so might be less vulnerable to attempting to extract the income through rent increases. It also more easily adjusts to location-based pricing sensitivity -- it's totally reasonable for a place like SF to have a higher "minimum wage" than a less expensive city (just as minimum wages can float from state to state), and the requirement for physical presence makes it harder to game this.
- naravara 10y ago
  You're going to have auditoriums full of smelly homeless people whose mere presence discourages others from participating in your program the way they already do with public parks and libraries in low-income areas. Unless you have mental health facilities to take them in in addition to the cash-auditorium you're going to be SOL. Addressing all the addressable avenues for abuse is also going to be a grim looking situation where you're going to be policing people sitting there to make sure they're not sending e-mails from their phones or having conversations with each other or reading books. Lots of peoples' jobs involve studying or having meetings.

83 points by mattkrisiloff 10y ago

minimaxir 10y ago

Shouldn't this be posted in the Who is Hiring thread instead? :P

thedogeye 10y ago

Sweet! Where can I sign up to receive my basic income?

Tycho 10y ago

Apologies if this has been discussed extensively. But it occurs to me that the US (and maybe other Western countries) has a retirement crisis - ie. people have not saved nearly enough for their retirement, and state-related pensions/entitlements are a massive strain on the budgets. So with that in mind, how the heck can these countries even consider rolling out a new "basic income" program? Doesn't this seem a bit incongruous?

dsr_ 10y ago
Basic income would solve that problem too, by replacing the state pension programs. (The US has very few real pension programs any more, since the 401(k) and IRA systems were put into effect and displaced them.)
- sokoloff 10y ago
  I don't see this happening. Basic income will be a terribly spartan existence (I estimate not more than $650/person/month with pretty generous guessestimating). Anyone who works for the government (including teaching & military) with retirement benefits is not going to subsist on just UBI once they stop working.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    This all depends on how many jobs are displaced due to automation, if 40% of our workforce ends up unemployed due to robots taking over their jobs it doesn't seem unreasonable to take 30% of the GDP to supply a BI program (which would give roughly 1/2 the median income to each person in the country if my math was right).
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      Do away with minimum wage laws (no longer needed and no longer desirable with a UBI program in place, IMO), and 40% of the workforce won't end up unemployed/unemployable.
      - snuxoll 10y ago
        I'm fine with eliminating the minimum wage in a society with a UBI, wokers will be able to compete purely on value and wages will reflect as much - but the UBI needs to actually be a livable amount and not below current poverty / minimum wage levels.
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      30% of GDP is almost double[1] the entire federal tax receipts currently. That means you're going to need to raise taxes to between 2x and 2.5x their current level in order to institute a program of that magnitude. That does meet my bar of "unreasonable". [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
      - Scarblac 10y ago
        He's talking about a scenario where 40% is unemployed due to automation, that's pretty apocalyptic. If that can be dealt with pretty well with only a 2.5x raise in tax levels, that sounds good to me.
        sokoloff 10y ago
        Taking federal taxes to 2.5x their current levels takes the top marginal rate over 100%, and that's before any state or local taxes are added. Mathematically, that makes no sense.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Basic income would solve that problem too, by replacing the state pension programs. This doesn't actually fit very well with the conceptual basis of UBI as a replacement for means-tested benefit programs, as defined-benefit pensions are not means-tested benefits. Though its true that a number (though not all) UBI proponents have either explicitly called for replacing existing Social Security-style retirement programs, or implicitly suggested that by including the existing cost of those programs as funds available for UBI.
Tarrosion 10y ago
Part of the idea is that with a basic income, there's no longer a need for many "social safety net" programs: disability, social security, food stamps, medicaid, etc. The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income. I'm not sure if this is true or not. You can find serious people with reasonable seeming numbers on both sides of that argument.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Right.. Basic income essentially wants to take mone out of the pot currently reserved for the needy and disabled, and distribute it to able-bodied people who choose not to enter the work force.
  - RyanZAG 10y ago
    I believe the basic idea is to use that able-bodied distribution as an excuse to heavily raise taxes, with the goal being that the needy and disabled would not receive less. The logic being that if everyone has a safety net, we don't need to reward people as much since they now have lower risk. Personally I don't believe that would actually happen, but the idea does account for that angle.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    There's nothing inherently wrong with not entering the workforce in the post-scarcity society we are rapidly approaching. People can instead choose to spend time raising their children, practicing a hobby, or trying to start their own business without fear of not being able to support themselves. Most humans naturally don't want to sidle idle all their lives, some will, but the vast majority will find some productive use of their time - a basic income means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours.
    - sfeng 10y ago
      The conflict here is that humans are animals, and animals evolved to use the minimum amount of energy possible to satisfy their needs. Yes you can learn the reward of willfully working hard, but I'm not sure whether everyone, or even most people, will make that transition.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
This is Y Combinator giving people money, not a state actor. It is probably(or should be) unconstitutional for the US to provide basic income, though the state of California might be able to.
- wmf 10y ago
  The production version of basic income is clearly government-based. YC is doing a private beta to decide whether to lobby governments to provide basic income.
- stevens32 10y ago
  What's the argument for basic income through government being unconstitutional?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Basic income (including its funding stream) can be implemented as an income tax with a fixed refundable credit per qualified individual [0], so its unmistakably exactly as Constitutional as federal income tax. [0] E.g., if you decide that the UBI goes to all adult citizens and legal permanent residents, then that's the population that gets the credit.
  - MichaelBurge 10y ago
    They certainly have the power to collect the tax money required, and the Social Security SCOTUS case(Helvering v. Davis) sets a pretty good starting point for their power to spend. I'd argue that while they have the power to spend the money on a wide variety of social programs(per the General Welfare clause), they don't have the power to redistribute income since it doesn't have a designated purpose. Spending is an exchange of money for services or goods, while UBI would just be an exchange of money. Even if redistribution was considered a type of spending, the case mentions specific facts that harmed the elderly(employee age limits being the main one). If these mattered to the original case, then giving UBI to young people who choose not to work should be a weaker case, which makes it reasonable for SCOTUS to disagree at least on those examples. Social Security is a combination of a forced retirement savings plan and a delayed redistribution of income. I don't know if anyone has argued that the redistribution part alone is unconstitutional, but the forced savings part comes from the payout increasing as you put more money in. A UBI would be entirely a redistribution. A similar argument might apply to cases where the EITC causes a net benefit to be given to someone, but: A. The government could argue that the EITC is intended to benefit the poor, which seems similar to arguing that Social Security benefits the elderly and B. I don't know if anyone has standing to bring a suit, since those cases are probably rare and the damages would be small.
thedevil 10y ago
I have the same concern. I've heard arguments, but none that adequately address the issue. While I'm a fan of the idea of adopting basic income eventually, I don't see how we can fund it now without serious negative consequences. Unfortunately the studies I've read about here on HN (including this one I'm guessing) seem to only address the positive side without actually comparing costs vs benefits.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  Every time I do the math for BI people I never get upvotes, so it never gets attention. Yes, one day in the far future basic income will work, but right now even assuming nobody that is currently working will stop working, it will cost a _ton_ of money. Especially from the top part of the tax bracket.
  - mercutio2 10y ago
    Great! That's the point. People in my tax bracket should be paying vastly more in taxes. People who lobby for basic income certainly shouldn't pussyfoot around the notion that it's fundamentally a redistributive tax. My goal is to eliminate poverty for US citizens who don't insist on living in extremely high cost areas. Secondary goals are to enable the poor to refuse to do bullshit jobs, and undermine the deeply-held notion that wage work is ennobling. The only way to achieve such redistribution is now, as it has always been, to tax rich people like me.
    - 3pt14159 10y ago
      Hey I'm there with you. I'd rather people in the 1% pay 80% taxes instead of 40% taxes, but the reality is that very, very, very few people in the 1% think like we do, and a good number people in the upper middle class and middle class are going to be worse off as well. It's obviously the long term solution, but it's not politically palatable yet.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> So with that in mind, how the heck can these countries even consider rolling out a new "basic income" program? Unconditional income programs (whether they meet basic needs or not) are conceived of as replacing some or all existing means-tested benefit programs, and reducing or eliminating the adverse employment effects of minimum wage laws (without eliminating the income-floor effects of those same laws). They can be budget neutral by either being cost neutral (redirecting funds from the displaced programs) or by being tied to specific new funding sources. (Given that one of the long-term goals is to address long-term concentration of economic gains in capital rather than labor, capital-specific income or ad valorem taxation is the natural place to look for dedicated new revenue streams.)
- Tycho 10y ago
  How can they be cost neutral? That would only happen if by luck the same number of people applied to basic income as previously applied for means-tested benefits. I find this scenario unlikely! Also, even if you have some new funding source, the system would have potentially huge liabilities if lots of people decide to sign up for it. Given that we can barely manage pensions, which I suspect have more stable characteristics than the hypothetical distribution of basic income requests, I'm skeptical that we could successfully manage a basic income program.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > How can they be cost neutral? That's literally exactly what the GP post explains. If the funds distributed as UBI are the funds redirected from replaced programs, the costs are, by definition, the same. > That would only happen if by luck the same number of people applied to basic income as previously applied for means-tested benefits. No, it wouldn't. You are assuming equal per beneficiary per time period total benefit + administrative costs. > Also, even if you have some new funding source, the system would have potentially huge liabilities if lots of people decide to sign up for it. No, its not dependent on people who "decide to sign up for" since, by definition, an unconditional income is given unconditionally to every member of the target population; that's part of the basic calculation of the benefit that can be given at any funding level.
koolba 10y ago
Nonsense. Since when did not having money to pay existing obligations stop lawmakers from legislating new unpaid handouts?

thedogeye 10y ago

The cost of basic income in the United States is about equal to the cost of getting us off permanently off of fossil fuels. This is going to send heads spinning as we decide which one we care about more, poverty or the environment.

WaxProlix 10y ago
Sashimi and gyoza cost about the same amount but I had both for lunch yesterday.
RyanZAG 10y ago
Getting permanently off fossil fuels is a one-off cost. Basic income is an ever increasing and perpetual cost. I don't think they are comparable.

zaguios 10y ago

For anyone who is interested, I actually recently started a basic income experiment of my own. You can check it out here: https://www.swiftdemand.com/ https://www.swiftdemand.com/ Essentially the way that it works is that anyone who signs up will receive 100 coins each day and they may be freely traded among users. Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work. If anyone has any questions or suggestions relating to the service I would love to discuss them.

wehadfun 10y ago
How is the experiment going. Are people using this yet?
- zaguios 10y ago
  You can check out some information on the stats page: https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats I actually only released the website less than a week ago so it's still incredibly new, but people have already done some cool stuff with it. This guy set up a website to write haikus in exchange for coins http://swiftpoetry.club/ http://swiftpoetry.club/ I'm planning on setting up a service to allow people to more easily exchange coins into their local countries currency and develop an API so websites can more easily accept Swift Demand as a payment option, but these things are still in the pipeline.
- wehadfun 10y ago
  Pretty cool! Any plan to open source this thing or give it to community. Would not want to do anything substantial for a swiftcoin if there is a concern that they could be taken away or lost or something.
literallycancer 10y ago
>Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work. How is this going to happen?

cpursley 10y ago

> Hiring for Basic Income So much irony in just four words. I love it.

selllikesybok 10y ago

Might want to fix this -> https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-rhodes/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-rhodes/

craigcannon 10y ago
Fixed. Thanks for the heads-up!
- selllikesybok 10y ago
  Hmm, Elizabeth's author profile still show's Matt's info, for me...

desireco42 10y ago

It is really cowardly to use throwaway account when posting.

hnbroseph 10y ago
...and? cowards are people too.
withdavidli 10y ago
500+ days old and 877 karma. Doesn't look like a throwaway. Maybe just an ironic name.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13708932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13708932 and marked it off-topic.
desireco42 10y ago
It is off topic, sorry moderators. It seems whenever someone wants to say something a little bit controversial or not as mainstream, they use throwaway account. And I think this is not fair. I noticed this in number of discussions. And people like to throw opinions but don't stand behind them.

amelius 10y ago

I suppose that one good way to research BI is by making the national lotteries provide a prize that basically corresponds to a BI, and then make sure that participants agree to partake in the research (e.g., surveys).

andrewla 10y ago

One alternative to unconditional basic income would be an presence-based minimum wage. The idea would be not only to replace welfare and social security and other conditional income sources but also replace the idea of the minimum wage with a funded mandate. I'm not sure where this idea came from, though I believe I heard it attributed to Milton Friedman (though I've not been able to find a reference). The idea would be to have an auditorium, where you would come in and sit and do nothing, and be paid the minimum wage when you leave based only on the amount of time you spent in the room. Individuals would be free to accept wages lower than the minimum wage for outside jobs, but employers would have to compete with that minimum wage for employees, so any lower wages offered would have to compete in other aspects -- pensions, tips, benefits, opportunities for advancement, etc. Because this would require physical presence, it would naturally be self-limiting in some aspects of abuse; you can "sit" as many or as few hours as you wish, but you cannot use that time for other productive work, so there's a natural fall-off of benefits as you choose to work instead (rather than an artificial administrative "cliff"). There are other aspects which seem very vulnerable to abuse -- why not just sleep there, what about doing remote work on a laptop, what about setting up shop and selling hot dogs in the room, etc. And there are some aspects which seem logistically problematic -- how do people commute to the room, how many rooms do you need, what about people who have disabilities that prevent them from travelling, etc. But generally all of these seem addressable, and some of them might just be self-regulating by social norms, so that there is a small but acceptable amount of leakage due to abuse. It seems administrative simpler in some regards than UBI, in that the uniqueness of a recipient is more easily enforceable, and it doesn't just change the y-intercept of the income curve, but rather semi-truncates it, so might be less vulnerable to attempting to extract the income through rent increases. It also more easily adjusts to location-based pricing sensitivity -- it's totally reasonable for a place like SF to have a higher "minimum wage" than a less expensive city (just as minimum wages can float from state to state), and the requirement for physical presence makes it harder to game this.

naravara 10y ago
You're going to have auditoriums full of smelly homeless people whose mere presence discourages others from participating in your program the way they already do with public parks and libraries in low-income areas. Unless you have mental health facilities to take them in in addition to the cash-auditorium you're going to be SOL. Addressing all the addressable avenues for abuse is also going to be a grim looking situation where you're going to be policing people sitting there to make sure they're not sending e-mails from their phones or having conversations with each other or reading books. Lots of peoples' jobs involve studying or having meetings.