25 ms·

The Future of Not Working

387 points by WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

antingate2 10y ago
NYT fake news globalist propaganda is not working.
deleted 10y ago
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Dagwoodie 10y ago
Here's how I think the only possible way this will ever be realized: A non-profit organization will have one of the highest (top 10 to pick an arbitrary number) net-worths of any company on earth.
- laser 10y ago
  Like a government?
- marmot777 10y ago
  like a government but with a single mission to administer this program. It could be a good idea. I don't know.
  - laser 10y ago
    Like a department or agency of government? In the US the SSA may be a good contender.
- solidsnack9000 10y ago
  The Catholic Church.
- tim333 10y ago
  The article states that the $66bn "it would take to get everyone above the poverty line" is "about half of what the world spends on foreign aid." Maybe they could just reallocate a bit.
hackathonguy 10y ago
"One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just $66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what the world spends on foreign aid." Love this.
- einars 10y ago
  I also liked this: A vast majority of aid — 94 percent — is noncash. Donor resistance is one reason for this; it is not easy to persuade American oligarchs, British inheritors and Japanese industrialists to fork over their money to the extremely poor to use as they see fit. “There’s the usual worries about welfare dependency, the whole ‘Give a man a fish’ thing,” said Amanda Glassman, a public health and development expert at the Center for Global Development. “It’s so powerful. It’s really a basic psychological feature of the landscape. You’ll start drinking. You’ll start lying around at home because you’re getting paid.” ... If cash transfers flourished, “the whole aid industry would have to fire itself.”
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Key words to remember there... "Aid industry".
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    I'm not against cash transfers, but I feel like they can't solve everything, having a bit more money won't necessarily cause hospitals or schools to appear, so I think that some non-cash support will continue to be necessary to provide expertise that they couldn't obtain on the free market.
    - jhlgkhkhil 10y ago
      If direct cash transfers work the economy of the recipient country will grow. They can then afford to build their own schools and hospitals - and employ teachers and doctors to work in them.
Clubber 10y ago
The people with the wealth pay people for one reason and one reason only: they have to. Once they no longer have to, they will lobby the government to continue to lower taxes and squawk about laziness, welfare queens, and all that garbage. This will go on for a few decades until there is an uprising of sorts, then those with the money will return to giving everyone else crumbs, or just enough to quell the uprisings. This will probably go on perpetually.
- HeavenBanned 10y ago
  >or just enough to quell the uprisings. There's actually an economic model for this "sweet spot" wherein the rich can maximize their profits to the breaking point before revolt happens believe it or not, and it's widely taught in Capitalist universities as a very reliable and worthy economic tool to ensure the rich stay rich without reprieve. Though the way they frame it is not malicious or neo-feudalistic, it's as a way of promoting "stability." Capitalism=Feudalism with makeup.
- mtrn 10y ago
  You might like The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick[1]. In this 1964 novel the world has shifted slightly: Instead of giving "just enough to quell the uprisings", large parts of the population are just kept eternally busy to support the wealthy lifestyle of a few. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth
  - marmot777 10y ago
    Hey if you're a person receiving basic income so you have basic security, then you're free to work for more money or if that fails as it likely will at times, you'll really appreciate having that foundation of basic income. Yes, there are huge disparities of wealth but when I look at the world my young son is living in and has to deal with, I don't want instability, revolutions, chaos as know enough history to know the failure rate of all that stuff's very high. If the underlying purpose is to "quell the uprisings" or because of pure motives does not particularly concern me. I'm interested in results.
- 10y ago
spyckie2 10y ago
The article's title is misleading - it is not about not working, it's about giving money directly to poor villages for 12 years to provide what is similar to basic income but meeting fundamentally different needs in a very different part of the world. That said, I think it is a fascinating anthropological read. We often do not realize how many layers of wealth we had to stand on to possess our current wealth.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  the subtlety is 'of', not 'is', which changes the meaning. Agree it's kinda a poorly written headline
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    It's not just the headline. This is essentially describing charity to poor communities. That's not new. The article's connection between it and "basic income" is tenuous. To be fair, that's not the fault of the article as much as the program itself. How is charity to poor rural communities with collectivist leanings a test of the vague notion of basic income? Or what will this program tell us about basic income in the US with 300 million people and a much higher standard of living? Admirable social program, yes. A test of the viability of basic income worldwide? Not so much.
    - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
      With each step, we shall come closer to a test which is applicable to the USA's poor. For now, we are establishing whether the concept works at all. The article described several previous tests, each of smaller scale and with flaws which this new test aims to eliminate. This program will tell us what the next test should look like.
      - aaron-lebo 10y ago
        Do you mind pointing out where? I went back through the article and found: With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income. As you stated, there have been other attempts, so I don't know what the definition of "first true test" is. A universal basic income has thus far lacked what tech folks might call a proof of concept. There have been a handful of experiments, including ones in Canada, India and Namibia. Finland is sending money to unemployed people, and the Dutch city Utrecht is doing a trial run, too. But no experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time — when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child. The Mincome experiment was 5-years. Why was it not "truly complete"? http://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/20/world/dauphin http://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/20/world/dauphin Back to the article: That, surprisingly, worked well enough to give them the confidence to start a threadbare randomized control trial the year they graduated. It found that the recipients, who received an average of $500, saw excellent outcomes: Their children were 42 percent less likely to go a whole day without eating. Domestic-violence rates dropped, and mental health improved. Not trying to be argumentative, just not sure what this is testing. What is it controlling for? What is it doing different from previous experiments? What does giving money to every person in a poor community tell you that giving money to poor people in a wealthy community doesn't? These are very rural and impoverished communities by developed standards. Giving money to the poorest of the poor seems like an obvious improvement for them. What it doesn't say is how you can do it anywhere else.
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rubicon33 10y ago
> "The research wing of Sam Altman’s start-up incubator, Y Combinator, is planning to pass out money to 1,000 families in California and another yet-to-be-determined state." Oh, really? Where do we sign up? I'd love to be able to build my business(es) without taking investor funds.
- nowarninglabel 10y ago
  I believe it's happening in Oakland for the California one at least. Your remark about building your business without taking investor funds may have been made in jest, but most people build their small businesses through debt rather than investor equity. For those interested in loans for building a small business, Kiva (who I work for) offers interest-free loans here in the U.S. to those without access to traditional credit or those building socially impactful businesses.
  - tim333 10y ago
    I note in the article many recipients of the cash used it to start businesses. Maybe it's a common response.
- marmot777 10y ago
  That's a pretty cynical attitude. It's obvious the intent of this is to test a program that has the potential to keep people from drowning. I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    I don't think you understand what Basic Income is. Basic income is meant to support people who desperately need it as well as wealthy hipsters who just don't feel like working. Means-tested welfare is indeed a program with the intent of "keeping people from drowning", but that's explicitly NOT what this is about.
    - marmot777 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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stagbeetle 10y ago
> As automation reduces the need for human labor, some Silicon Valley executives think a universal income will be the answer — and the beta test is happening in Kenya. This is not the situation I think of when I hear "basic income." Why Kenya? > GiveDirectly wants to show the world that a basic income is a cheap, scalable way to aid the poorest people on the planet. Oh. I was under the belief that only the middle class protested for basic income. It would have been more interesting if the "beta test" was done on educated/ first world persons, so we can finally get progress (or a full stop) on this debate. I believe this idea wasn't thought out past the "we want to put on airs" phase. Is injecting capital into a system that relies on crime to keep afloat, really the best idea GiveDirectly could have come up with? This is similar to the Toms fiasco where they would donate a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair bought -- it crippled the local fabrics businesses. Perhaps if one wanted to fix the African economy, one would invest into economic think-tanks and their executionary tandems, instead of over glorified tax shelters.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  Kenya is very cheap, as opposed to a UBI trial in America, which would be far more expensive
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    This is true. It looks like Finland is doing the first experiment, even if it's only on the unemployed[0]. [0]http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/finland-begins-universal-basic-income-trial-as-the-world-watches/news-story/7ae91901c856ca697ed6b30e18cbba00 http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/finland-begins-...
- Arizhel 10y ago
  >I was under the belief that only the middle class protested for basic income. It would have been more interesting if the "beta test" was done on educated/ first world persons, so we can finally get progress (or a full stop) on this debate. The middle class protests for UBI because the middle class is the one with enough education and free time to think about these problems, and push for solutions, and that also cares about such things (the rich generally don't). The middle class also is closer to the poor side, and both sees what the welfare state is really like and how much of a mess it is and why UBI would be so much simpler and easier to administer, and the middle class also has to worry more about backsliding into the lower classes and so realizes how good it'd be to have that safety net in place. You're absolutely right, it would be better to "beta test" in industrialized nations, esp. the USA with its very large amount of spending for social services (SNAP, TANF, etc.) and also its large and growing divide between rich and poor and the falling of many poorer people into poverty as their jobs are automated away. Places like Kenya don't really have this issue; they were never highly industrialized. However, doing a "beta test" in the US would be very expensive and it is flatly impossible, politically, at this point in time. The best we can hope for is to try it out in someplace like Finland. So until then, I guess the idea is to try it out in places like Kenya, where it can be done extremely cheaply because the local cost-of-living is so ridiculously low and the standard of living is low too. (Give $10 a week to a Kenyan living in a hut and it'll have a big effect on their lifestyle; give $10 a week to an American, anywhere in the US, and it won't make any difference at all. Maybe they can buy lunch 1 or 2 days with it, and that's about it. It certainly won't pay the rent.) >This is similar to the Toms fiasco where they would donate a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair bought -- it crippled the local fabrics businesses. That's something people are going to have to deal with in a globalized world; local businesses have to compete, to some extent, with businesses across the planet. But this is not similar to what you describe. This is giving cash directly to people, to spend how they will; it doesn't favor or disfavor any local business, it just injects more money into the local economy, mainly at the lowest levels, where it'll be spent quickly. If anything, it should be a boon for local fabrics businesses, as the locals will now have more disposable income to spend on things like that. Of course, they might also spend it on manufactured goods shipped from China, but that's not such a bad thing: it'll raise their standard of living regardless.
paulpauper 10y ago
It would seem like 'going to work' is becoming a thing of the past, at least for increasingly many people. Labor force participation at multi-decade lows. Gig jobs, welfare, disability, prolonged education, social security/retirement, and the 'underground economy' is replacing a significant chunk of the traditional job market.
- tim333 10y ago
  Not in the UK. "The employment rate in the UK has hit another record high of 74.2%, and there are more people in work than ever before." https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employment-rate-hits-record-742 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employment-rate-hits-reco...
marmot777 10y ago
I got to this on my reading list finally, realizing my first impression that this was a piece promoting an organization called GiveDirectly, wasn't a sound impression (lesson: don't comment till you read the article). This is a higher level than that, it's testing Universal Income, frequently called universal basic income. Public policy whether implemented by governments or by organizations should test, innovate, change, not just pick an approach and run with it as seems to happen with the largest programs here in the U.S. As far as I can tell there's not been much innovation in the implementation of the safety net since Johnson. Like anything else humans try to do, there will be bugs, there will be blind alleys, there will be mistakes. Small scale testing is a necessary step so that a working model is ready for larger-scale testing or maybe it'll be found that the implementation will have to have configurations that vary according to local conditions and even just preferences. I'm a Pacific Northwest guy perhaps out of touch with what Silicon Valley is up to, sometimes I'm critical, but for this initiative, I say thank you. I have no clue how I'd thank anyone for this so just in case anyone involved is reading my comment I would like to express gratitude for doing work that has a high probability of playing a part in making the world a liveable place for my young son and the rest of humanity in the years to come. By the way, if you've got the chops to beta test UI any chance you could save the Amazon Basin?! Please.
jimmywanger 10y ago
I think that fundamentally, the thing we're going to run up against is population growth. I think history has proven that we can live in extremely wretched conditions. By giving money to people, are we going to be increasing their living standards or just creating more mouths to feed? Note that the basic income only applies to whoever registers at the beginning of the program. Would that amount of basic income cause the population to explode, so that the per-capita amount of goods/money remains constant?
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  wealth is strongly inversely coorolated with population growth. Keeping people in poverty means they have more children, not the reverse.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    As replied to above, the basic income doesn't highly correspond to wealth on the scales involved based on the studies frequently cited.
  - reddytowns 10y ago
    UBI would incentivize people to have more kids. I think that would override the wealth to children correlation. Also, wealthy people are often busy trying to maintain their own wealth. The excuse about not having kids is often about being more career oriented.
  - aianus 10y ago
    Only because wealth is positively correlated with education and impulse control. There's no reason to believe handing a poor, uneducated person with no impulse control a big wad of cash will have the same effect.
- marmot777 10y ago
  Wealth has the opposite effect as a number of studies have demonstrated. People with a little money in their pocket have fewer kids. I can easily find more citations if you'd like but here's an outline of the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
NumberCruncher 10y ago
The African people would me much better off if we would stop selling them weapons and would pay a fair price for their work and natural resources. But hey, that wouldn't be a great PR action making headlines!
- cdetrio 10y ago
  Of course the best solution is for everybody to just coordinate. But coordination is hard, because there are strong incentives for individuals to defect (see also "Meditations on Moloch"). Making incremental improvements is the next best hope, and this one (giving cash) could turn out to be much more effective than previous state-of-the-art interventions (giving food, medicines, books, etc.). Additionally, enough incremental improvement might reach a tipping point where the poverty/coordination trap can be escaped, and the global equilibrium shifts.
- marmot777 10y ago
  Acting as you suggest and programs like this aren't mutually exclusive propositions. I doubt that the people backing this program are the same people selling arms to Africa. So nobody should do anything unless they can also solve all problems? I actually upvoted your comment because I agree that those things should stop but I don't have the slightest bit of power to stop it and those who are conducting these sort of studies have more power than me but when put up against giant problems, it's at the margins. That is, they can't stop the arms trade either.
  - NumberCruncher 10y ago
    My problem is that programs like this does not change anything except making us first world citizens feeling comfortable about not having the power to stop exploitation of a whole continent. It is like a drug for the society making us feel good when we should feel bad and ashamed. And calling it "basic income" is just propaganda.
    - marmot777 10y ago
      I don't think that's the point. This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions. If this concept proves viable, then that could serve as a model to scale it up. The problem this is trying to solve isn't that of just the developing world, the developed world is sliding toward a catastrophic failure of the system that depends on there being a job (aka a way to make a living) for every adult who wants to work. I'm not sure but we could be there now. If we aren't there now it won't be long. The trend toward automation and the rise of AI are enough on its own but there are other trends working against the current system. Add to that even for people who have steady work how well has the retirement saving system been going in the U.S.? There are millions of people who will retire completely unprepared to support themselves for even a decade of retirement. The need will be global. Unless you're wealthy enough to have no worries at all about money, you might someday be grateful for these initial tests that led to the successful deployment of this system for you. I know I worry about how many years I can make it into retirement when that day comes and I really worry about my son who's a small child. The system is failing yet slow enough that perhaps it hasn't hit you yet. Actually, even if you ARE wealthy, if the system becomes too unstable ultimately we all eat it. Instability is everyone's adversary.
woodandsteel 10y ago
It's interesting how this runs counter to the two dominant political ideologies in the US. Liberals believe that the poor are too dumb and helpless to figure out what they want, so the government should do it, both domestically and in foreign aid. Conservatives believe that the poor are poor because they are unintelligent and lack good values (or they are acting rationally in response to liberal welfare programs), and domestic and foreign programs should be eliminated in favor of religious missions. What programs like this are finding is the the poor are intelligent and well-motivated, and they just need an opportunity to get out of the hole they are stuck in. Let me add that, from what I understand, foreign aid programs can be very helpful in areas like public health.
- marmot777 10y ago
  This program doesn't have an ideology I don't think nor does it make assumptions about people. Give people money and some will work on top of it to live higher, some will write a novel, some will devote themselves to building software. And yes some will sit around taking bong hits and eating Cheetos. It does not matter to me as none of these is likely to hurt others. Where someone is using this money to hurt others we have laws as imperfect as they are. Humans will always be imperfect and society will always be imperfect as an understatement.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  I think it's important to realize that there are many causes of poverty, ranging from political to cultural to infrastructure to capital. What programs like GiveDirectly and the Grameen Bank's operations in Bangladesh are finding is that when the limiting factor is lack of money, giving people money helps, a lot. There are other places in the world where the limiting factor is that if you give people money, some warlord will come in with guns and take it away. There are other places where if you give money, the local villagers will drink it away. There are still other places where you can give money and people will use it productively to grow more crops, and then the crops will rot in the fields because the transportation infrastructure to transport them to where they're needed doesn't exist. In places like Kenya or Bangladesh where there is relatively peace, a relatively industrious culture, and the know-how to profitably invest capital, giving money helps. In other places - DRC for example, or rural Peru - the money just gets redistributed to people who will use it to keep the locals down.
ImTalking 10y ago
Anything that reduces the oppression of women is a good thing. Freedom is the ability to make choices.
- returnbuyer 10y ago
  Women are not oppressed in America, they are in Islamic countries though. Somehow the solution to that is to import more Islam. Hm.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
jayajay 10y ago
If every known resource acquisition task was automated, and the discovery of unknown non-automated tasks could be automated to be automated, we'd be post-scarcity and the concepts of working and income wouldn't be useful metrics anymore. So, yeah machines are a big black hole and our jobs are doomed asteroids spiraling into the black hole. As they spiral into the singularity, humans will be displaced at an accelerating rate, and it will take more ingenuity and effort for humans to maintain "work". And, for what? In the asymptotic limit, the outcome should be no more jobs and "work" in a the way we currently define them, and humans will be truly free to creative pursuits. Never shall a beautiful human mind be wasted on labor which a machine can do. At some point, machines will be the dominant species pushing civilization forward, not us. Until then, we're forced to work, we're forced into employment because our world does not simply give us what we want. Food and spears don't fall out of the sky, so we will waste our time hunting and farming until we figure out how to make those things "fall out of the sky".
temp-ora 10y ago
the title does not reflect the article and the article does not reflect the subject. like everyone else here, i did not read it because after dangling a few hard facts and conclusions in front of your face, the article goes off on tangents about the personal stories of people who are involved but not instrumental. this toxic mix of novel-style story telling and actual reporting has made these articles unreadable for me. people dont give a shit about the narrative of the stupid author or even people involved in setting up this whole thing -- people want to know how the experiment went! did it work? did the people end up being lazy and unproductive like all the ubi detractors say they will? but no, i cannot know these things without fishing through pages of garbage. and when i know someone else has already done it here in the comments to reap the karma, why on earth would i even click the link?
temp-ora 10y ago
we do not use money because it makes sense. money exists in the form it takes today because of human nature. we think someone has to earn their food. we think a homeless person deserves a handout because they look like they are at least trying to get on their feet (or not when they dont). machine intelligence is not the only problem that our wealth distribution system is facing. we have faced massive inequality before, and are facing it right now, and no solutions have been implemented. and like all the trials of equality before it, the automation of jobs will result in the smartest and fasted humans owning the vast majority of wealth and influence while the rest of us sit in mud.
- chillwaves 10y ago
  > the automation of jobs will result in the smartest and fasted humans owning the vast majority of wealth and influence while the rest of us sit in mud. So you are arguing the rich are rich because they are the smartest? I would tweak your assessment. The rich are rich because wealth perpetuates the capture of wealth at a rate greater than the expansion of the economy.
  - temp-ora 10y ago
    having wealth is one half of the equation when it comes to self perpetuation of wealth. being very smart is the other half. look at people who win the lottery. they spend it all away, often becoming broke. and the people who get wealth in the first place are more likely to be smart. smart people end up getting a lot of money because they are smart. and they use it to stay wealthy because they are smart.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Can someone summarize the results?
praetorian84 10y ago
Interesting comment below the article regarding a government-run programme in Brazil trying something similar: "However, there is a trend of the part of these persons become dependent of this benefit and do not strive to change this situation..." That was my immediate reaction after reading this. What about after the twelve years, when the donors ride off into the sunset? There are some encouraging stories there of participants using the money wisely, but not all will do so. You could argue that nobody is forcing them to participate, but it does seem at least a little ethically questionable. Particularly given the targeted demographic of a rural Kenyan community with (presumably - I could be wrong) low education levels.
- PeterStuer 10y ago
  If this solves their basic needs, housing, food, medical, education, ..., then why would they need to 'strive for change"? Seems to me the world would be a far better place if people could get more content with just living. We have no shortage of produce already, and that is before the automation revolutions coming in the next decades. Just living without exponential 'wealth' accumulation plans that invariably seem to include some form of over-exploiting natural resources while externalizing the effects, or rent-seeking schemes that create lopsided distributions, seems to be a far more 'civil' future.
WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
Giving money is a great short term solution but we all know that free always has a limit. 22 dollars per month is a good start but at 22 bux they will never reach the standard of living we enjoy in the west. The goal should be to ensure that everyone has a job or business that provides the person a decent living. I think that in addition to the money they should help with the following: 1)Education and the ability to get it at will. Financial education should be a priority. 2)Entrepreneurship, make sure anyone that wants to start a business knows what to do. 3)Security and the enforcement of the law thru a judicial system, both criminal and civil. 4)A working financial system. Make sure businesses and people can borrow money. 5)A way to go bankrupt that will let people start over. It should not be too painful for both creditors and borrowers. 6)A political system that works for the majority. 7) Community leadership that works towards the betterment of the town. 8)A tax system that will let the town provide items that no single person can provide on their own. It's a reality as painful as they are taxes and their prudent use help improve the community's standard of living. 9) Secure property rights. If someone owns something they should do with it what they want without infringing on the community's well being and no one should be able to take it away from them by force. What gets me railed up is the inability to use the town's human capital. Giving free money will not help forever. If you could get people to work together they would eventually get out of poverty. Maybe the current generation might not but eventually they would be able to do it.
chvid 10y ago
As a form of foreign aid giving money directly probably works well. But idea that developing countries need basic income because of automation is just absurd. If anything they need to get to work developing their country; those shacks are not going to be built by robots. Fully developed countries on the other hand may face the situation where their country is so well run and have such a high level of automation and specialisation that there is too little work left for the population to be fully employed. And thus they may lower their pension age, experiment with 30 hour work weeks, sabbaticals, maternity leaves, basic income and so on. The countries that are closest to this are probably the Scandinavian countries. However at the moment they are all moving towards lower social transfers and higher pension age.
Razengan 10y ago
With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth. Don't want so many disgruntled and unemployed people? Endorse some form of guaranteed income, or incorporate basic housing, meals, healthcare and internet into the list of undeniable human rights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator
- alexryan 10y ago
  As long as important problems remained unsolved and human desires remain unfulfilled there will be opportunities to contribute.
- cannonpr 10y ago
  I do wonder about the "not everyone can contribute" perhaps they can't contribute in building cars, but with a cultural shift and education, well there are a lot of avenues of research and mathematics that only require thought and basic tools like chalk. I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources. This ofcourse assumes we haven't figured out strong AÍ or we don't want to, cause that's an entirely different chat.
  - manmal 10y ago
    Yes. We are made to be active (non-passive), so most people will choose to do _anything_ anyway. Might as well something that furthers our objectives.
  - jsemrau 10y ago
    I have been building houses in Indonesia and other parts of South East Asia and there is ample need for people who can build stuff and teach things.
agumonkey 10y ago
Work will have to be redefined. It's a psychological need to form teams and solve your needs or some others. That is the underlying basis.
Sir_Substance 10y ago
This is a nice article, but I'd like to remind everyone that it's probably also native advertising.
- exolymph 10y ago
  The New York Times discloses their native advertising. Also, I doubt that GiveDirectly has the budget for a $100k+ media campaign.
deleted 10y ago
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compareglobal 10y ago
Imagine life where you enjoy your work so much that it becomes your hobby. And here's our solution: we're seeking for rockstar developers to join us in Hong Kong! Email me for more details: rasmus.kors@compareglobalgroup.com
- askafriend 10y ago
  I can't tell if this is satire or spam - I guess that's the hallmark of good satire.
markiniotome 10y ago
I don't get it. Do they expect that smart people will work and pay huge taxes and the rest can just stay home and receive money for doing nothing? Working people can just move abroad and avoid paying those taxes.
anovikov 10y ago
This looks so shiny only because the experiment is low-scale. In a country with an acute shortage of access to capital, small money explainably gives huge returns. If it was done to every, or even every poor, household in Kenya, it won't have resulted in anything but inflation and probably riots/genocide/burning of Give Directly workers for witchcraft. If everyone could buy that fishnet, fish in Lake Victoria will run out in a month, and almost everyone who did that will have simply lost that money. Further advancement will need a ton of capital AND education, and tradition of legal system to sustain complex companies that depend on intangible assets... Simply put, require a first world country to be done in. Handing out $22 a month to every Kenyan would do absolutely nothing for him - at least many times less than handing out $22 to 0.01% of Kenyans. It's not like i don't believe in UBI. There are few other visible solutions to the automation problem (other may be economic incentivizing - like through tax breaks - and cultural promotion of resurrection of personal servants as a mass occupation) - but it can't work as good as this example simply because it doesn't scale so well.
- snarf21 10y ago
  This is the thing that irritates me soo much. People come up with an idea that doing X will solve problem Y but they ignore the fact you can't just change one simple thing in a complex system and not expect other variations. Giving everyone in the country X dollars will just result in inflation like you said. Plus, it will take wealth away from those people who had wealth currently make up to a small multiple of this new income. Adding access to clean water, plumbing and electricity is enabling and the kind of investment that will have the most return. Returns can also be had by starting to give access to credit/loans to enterprising people. I liken this issue to Democracy. You can't give a country Democracy but you can help create conditions for its citizens to build it themselves. But there is also a chance that they don't want it.
nrdwavexe 10y ago
Why is "defining a problem called 'not working'" not called "massively manipulating the economy"? From the point of view of the people who work hard to make Kenya's economy work, this can't possibly be helpful. It sounds like an evil, abusive psychological experiment. Forget about "fake news", the New York Times is literally evil news. It is literally promoting views that proliferate evil. Injecting this level of disorder into an economy and lying about it is a level of deception that goes into moral perversion. Let me make this clear: I am directly accusing Annie Lowrey of promoting excessively morally corrupt views. She is responsible for promoting evil. This is a person who wakes up in the morning and works hard to promote evil. Think about that. Edit: I was down-voted without explanation or rebuttal. If you disagree with what I have written, don't attack my anonymously. I want my karma to be a healthy score, and I don't appreciate people (or bots) decreasing my karma score, and I consider it a personal attack against my reputation.
- grzm 10y ago
  This is all speculation, but from what I've observed on HN there could be a number of reasons you were downvoted. - HN isn't primarily for political or ideological debate. Creating a new account and starting with a contentious comment probably looked like someone creating an account purely for ideological battle, which is an abuse of HN. - The HN community strongly values civil discourse, which usually requires keeping strong, passionate, strident language at a lower level, particularly on contentious issues. Phrases like "literally evil news", "literally promoting views that proliferate evil", and "moral perversion" don't meet the expectation of civil discourse, regardless of how strongly you believe them to be true. (Yes, this is "it's not what you say, it's how you say it".) - You've made a direct, harsh attack on someone without providing any support. - After receiving downvotes, you complained about it. This is explicitly against HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html As I stated from the outset, this is speculation. For what people would consider obvious disregard for community standards, they may downvote and not think it's necessary to comment why. As you express concern about your karma, as you're new to commenting on HN, I suggest refraining from commenting on contentious topics for a while until you become more accustomed to the HN community. There are plenty of other interesting submissions that you may find to contribute to and not find yourself as open to downvotes. I'm sorry you've found your first brush with the HN community to be negative. I hope you find what I've written useful and that you have a more positive experience in the future!
karmakaze 10y ago
Sounds like a great programme with little reported short-term negative effects. By no way is this a beta test to anything other than reproducing this in other similar cultural conditions, which may also require having seen previous aid attempts fail. The worst-case scenario I fear is that UBI given without also providing outlets for activities that actually get used will result in an adult version of problem of otherwise well-off of suburban youth.
prestonpesek 10y ago
In order for this to work, you have to define "universal" in the context of how automation affects the global economy, not just the US or any national economy. Example: are we going to send a stipend to Bengali citizens who are displaced from textile manufacturing jobs by robot factories in the U.S.?

387 points by WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

antingate2 10y ago

NYT fake news globalist propaganda is not working.

deleted 10y ago

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Dagwoodie 10y ago

Here's how I think the only possible way this will ever be realized: A non-profit organization will have one of the highest (top 10 to pick an arbitrary number) net-worths of any company on earth.

laser 10y ago
Like a government?
marmot777 10y ago
like a government but with a single mission to administer this program. It could be a good idea. I don't know.
- laser 10y ago
  Like a department or agency of government? In the US the SSA may be a good contender.
solidsnack9000 10y ago
The Catholic Church.
tim333 10y ago
The article states that the $66bn "it would take to get everyone above the poverty line" is "about half of what the world spends on foreign aid." Maybe they could just reallocate a bit.

hackathonguy 10y ago

"One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just $66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what the world spends on foreign aid." Love this.

einars 10y ago
I also liked this: A vast majority of aid — 94 percent — is noncash. Donor resistance is one reason for this; it is not easy to persuade American oligarchs, British inheritors and Japanese industrialists to fork over their money to the extremely poor to use as they see fit. “There’s the usual worries about welfare dependency, the whole ‘Give a man a fish’ thing,” said Amanda Glassman, a public health and development expert at the Center for Global Development. “It’s so powerful. It’s really a basic psychological feature of the landscape. You’ll start drinking. You’ll start lying around at home because you’re getting paid.” ... If cash transfers flourished, “the whole aid industry would have to fire itself.”
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Key words to remember there... "Aid industry".
- Eridrus 10y ago
  I'm not against cash transfers, but I feel like they can't solve everything, having a bit more money won't necessarily cause hospitals or schools to appear, so I think that some non-cash support will continue to be necessary to provide expertise that they couldn't obtain on the free market.
  - jhlgkhkhil 10y ago
    If direct cash transfers work the economy of the recipient country will grow. They can then afford to build their own schools and hospitals - and employ teachers and doctors to work in them.

Clubber 10y ago

The people with the wealth pay people for one reason and one reason only: they have to. Once they no longer have to, they will lobby the government to continue to lower taxes and squawk about laziness, welfare queens, and all that garbage. This will go on for a few decades until there is an uprising of sorts, then those with the money will return to giving everyone else crumbs, or just enough to quell the uprisings. This will probably go on perpetually.

HeavenBanned 10y ago
>or just enough to quell the uprisings. There's actually an economic model for this "sweet spot" wherein the rich can maximize their profits to the breaking point before revolt happens believe it or not, and it's widely taught in Capitalist universities as a very reliable and worthy economic tool to ensure the rich stay rich without reprieve. Though the way they frame it is not malicious or neo-feudalistic, it's as a way of promoting "stability." Capitalism=Feudalism with makeup.
mtrn 10y ago
You might like The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick[1]. In this 1964 novel the world has shifted slightly: Instead of giving "just enough to quell the uprisings", large parts of the population are just kept eternally busy to support the wealthy lifestyle of a few. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth
- marmot777 10y ago
  Hey if you're a person receiving basic income so you have basic security, then you're free to work for more money or if that fails as it likely will at times, you'll really appreciate having that foundation of basic income. Yes, there are huge disparities of wealth but when I look at the world my young son is living in and has to deal with, I don't want instability, revolutions, chaos as know enough history to know the failure rate of all that stuff's very high. If the underlying purpose is to "quell the uprisings" or because of pure motives does not particularly concern me. I'm interested in results.
10y ago

spyckie2 10y ago

The article's title is misleading - it is not about not working, it's about giving money directly to poor villages for 12 years to provide what is similar to basic income but meeting fundamentally different needs in a very different part of the world. That said, I think it is a fascinating anthropological read. We often do not realize how many layers of wealth we had to stand on to possess our current wealth.

paulpauper 10y ago
the subtlety is 'of', not 'is', which changes the meaning. Agree it's kinda a poorly written headline
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  It's not just the headline. This is essentially describing charity to poor communities. That's not new. The article's connection between it and "basic income" is tenuous. To be fair, that's not the fault of the article as much as the program itself. How is charity to poor rural communities with collectivist leanings a test of the vague notion of basic income? Or what will this program tell us about basic income in the US with 300 million people and a much higher standard of living? Admirable social program, yes. A test of the viability of basic income worldwide? Not so much.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    With each step, we shall come closer to a test which is applicable to the USA's poor. For now, we are establishing whether the concept works at all. The article described several previous tests, each of smaller scale and with flaws which this new test aims to eliminate. This program will tell us what the next test should look like.
    - aaron-lebo 10y ago
      Do you mind pointing out where? I went back through the article and found: With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income. As you stated, there have been other attempts, so I don't know what the definition of "first true test" is. A universal basic income has thus far lacked what tech folks might call a proof of concept. There have been a handful of experiments, including ones in Canada, India and Namibia. Finland is sending money to unemployed people, and the Dutch city Utrecht is doing a trial run, too. But no experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time — when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child. The Mincome experiment was 5-years. Why was it not "truly complete"? http://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/20/world/dauphin http://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/20/world/dauphin Back to the article: That, surprisingly, worked well enough to give them the confidence to start a threadbare randomized control trial the year they graduated. It found that the recipients, who received an average of $500, saw excellent outcomes: Their children were 42 percent less likely to go a whole day without eating. Domestic-violence rates dropped, and mental health improved. Not trying to be argumentative, just not sure what this is testing. What is it controlling for? What is it doing different from previous experiments? What does giving money to every person in a poor community tell you that giving money to poor people in a wealthy community doesn't? These are very rural and impoverished communities by developed standards. Giving money to the poorest of the poor seems like an obvious improvement for them. What it doesn't say is how you can do it anywhere else.

deleted 10y ago

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rubicon33 10y ago

> "The research wing of Sam Altman’s start-up incubator, Y Combinator, is planning to pass out money to 1,000 families in California and another yet-to-be-determined state." Oh, really? Where do we sign up? I'd love to be able to build my business(es) without taking investor funds.

nowarninglabel 10y ago
I believe it's happening in Oakland for the California one at least. Your remark about building your business without taking investor funds may have been made in jest, but most people build their small businesses through debt rather than investor equity. For those interested in loans for building a small business, Kiva (who I work for) offers interest-free loans here in the U.S. to those without access to traditional credit or those building socially impactful businesses.
- tim333 10y ago
  I note in the article many recipients of the cash used it to start businesses. Maybe it's a common response.
marmot777 10y ago
That's a pretty cynical attitude. It's obvious the intent of this is to test a program that has the potential to keep people from drowning. I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I don't think you understand what Basic Income is. Basic income is meant to support people who desperately need it as well as wealthy hipsters who just don't feel like working. Means-tested welfare is indeed a program with the intent of "keeping people from drowning", but that's explicitly NOT what this is about.
  - marmot777 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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stagbeetle 10y ago

> As automation reduces the need for human labor, some Silicon Valley executives think a universal income will be the answer — and the beta test is happening in Kenya. This is not the situation I think of when I hear "basic income." Why Kenya? > GiveDirectly wants to show the world that a basic income is a cheap, scalable way to aid the poorest people on the planet. Oh. I was under the belief that only the middle class protested for basic income. It would have been more interesting if the "beta test" was done on educated/ first world persons, so we can finally get progress (or a full stop) on this debate. I believe this idea wasn't thought out past the "we want to put on airs" phase. Is injecting capital into a system that relies on crime to keep afloat, really the best idea GiveDirectly could have come up with? This is similar to the Toms fiasco where they would donate a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair bought -- it crippled the local fabrics businesses. Perhaps if one wanted to fix the African economy, one would invest into economic think-tanks and their executionary tandems, instead of over glorified tax shelters.

paulpauper 10y ago
Kenya is very cheap, as opposed to a UBI trial in America, which would be far more expensive
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  This is true. It looks like Finland is doing the first experiment, even if it's only on the unemployed[0]. [0]http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/finland-begins-universal-basic-income-trial-as-the-world-watches/news-story/7ae91901c856ca697ed6b30e18cbba00 http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/finland-begins-...
Arizhel 10y ago
>I was under the belief that only the middle class protested for basic income. It would have been more interesting if the "beta test" was done on educated/ first world persons, so we can finally get progress (or a full stop) on this debate. The middle class protests for UBI because the middle class is the one with enough education and free time to think about these problems, and push for solutions, and that also cares about such things (the rich generally don't). The middle class also is closer to the poor side, and both sees what the welfare state is really like and how much of a mess it is and why UBI would be so much simpler and easier to administer, and the middle class also has to worry more about backsliding into the lower classes and so realizes how good it'd be to have that safety net in place. You're absolutely right, it would be better to "beta test" in industrialized nations, esp. the USA with its very large amount of spending for social services (SNAP, TANF, etc.) and also its large and growing divide between rich and poor and the falling of many poorer people into poverty as their jobs are automated away. Places like Kenya don't really have this issue; they were never highly industrialized. However, doing a "beta test" in the US would be very expensive and it is flatly impossible, politically, at this point in time. The best we can hope for is to try it out in someplace like Finland. So until then, I guess the idea is to try it out in places like Kenya, where it can be done extremely cheaply because the local cost-of-living is so ridiculously low and the standard of living is low too. (Give $10 a week to a Kenyan living in a hut and it'll have a big effect on their lifestyle; give $10 a week to an American, anywhere in the US, and it won't make any difference at all. Maybe they can buy lunch 1 or 2 days with it, and that's about it. It certainly won't pay the rent.) >This is similar to the Toms fiasco where they would donate a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair bought -- it crippled the local fabrics businesses. That's something people are going to have to deal with in a globalized world; local businesses have to compete, to some extent, with businesses across the planet. But this is not similar to what you describe. This is giving cash directly to people, to spend how they will; it doesn't favor or disfavor any local business, it just injects more money into the local economy, mainly at the lowest levels, where it'll be spent quickly. If anything, it should be a boon for local fabrics businesses, as the locals will now have more disposable income to spend on things like that. Of course, they might also spend it on manufactured goods shipped from China, but that's not such a bad thing: it'll raise their standard of living regardless.

paulpauper 10y ago

It would seem like 'going to work' is becoming a thing of the past, at least for increasingly many people. Labor force participation at multi-decade lows. Gig jobs, welfare, disability, prolonged education, social security/retirement, and the 'underground economy' is replacing a significant chunk of the traditional job market.

tim333 10y ago
Not in the UK. "The employment rate in the UK has hit another record high of 74.2%, and there are more people in work than ever before." https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employment-rate-hits-record-742 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employment-rate-hits-reco...

marmot777 10y ago

I got to this on my reading list finally, realizing my first impression that this was a piece promoting an organization called GiveDirectly, wasn't a sound impression (lesson: don't comment till you read the article). This is a higher level than that, it's testing Universal Income, frequently called universal basic income. Public policy whether implemented by governments or by organizations should test, innovate, change, not just pick an approach and run with it as seems to happen with the largest programs here in the U.S. As far as I can tell there's not been much innovation in the implementation of the safety net since Johnson. Like anything else humans try to do, there will be bugs, there will be blind alleys, there will be mistakes. Small scale testing is a necessary step so that a working model is ready for larger-scale testing or maybe it'll be found that the implementation will have to have configurations that vary according to local conditions and even just preferences. I'm a Pacific Northwest guy perhaps out of touch with what Silicon Valley is up to, sometimes I'm critical, but for this initiative, I say thank you. I have no clue how I'd thank anyone for this so just in case anyone involved is reading my comment I would like to express gratitude for doing work that has a high probability of playing a part in making the world a liveable place for my young son and the rest of humanity in the years to come. By the way, if you've got the chops to beta test UI any chance you could save the Amazon Basin?! Please.

jimmywanger 10y ago

I think that fundamentally, the thing we're going to run up against is population growth. I think history has proven that we can live in extremely wretched conditions. By giving money to people, are we going to be increasing their living standards or just creating more mouths to feed? Note that the basic income only applies to whoever registers at the beginning of the program. Would that amount of basic income cause the population to explode, so that the per-capita amount of goods/money remains constant?

throwaway2048 10y ago
wealth is strongly inversely coorolated with population growth. Keeping people in poverty means they have more children, not the reverse.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  As replied to above, the basic income doesn't highly correspond to wealth on the scales involved based on the studies frequently cited.
- reddytowns 10y ago
  UBI would incentivize people to have more kids. I think that would override the wealth to children correlation. Also, wealthy people are often busy trying to maintain their own wealth. The excuse about not having kids is often about being more career oriented.
- aianus 10y ago
  Only because wealth is positively correlated with education and impulse control. There's no reason to believe handing a poor, uneducated person with no impulse control a big wad of cash will have the same effect.
marmot777 10y ago
Wealth has the opposite effect as a number of studies have demonstrated. People with a little money in their pocket have fewer kids. I can easily find more citations if you'd like but here's an outline of the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

NumberCruncher 10y ago

The African people would me much better off if we would stop selling them weapons and would pay a fair price for their work and natural resources. But hey, that wouldn't be a great PR action making headlines!

cdetrio 10y ago
Of course the best solution is for everybody to just coordinate. But coordination is hard, because there are strong incentives for individuals to defect (see also "Meditations on Moloch"). Making incremental improvements is the next best hope, and this one (giving cash) could turn out to be much more effective than previous state-of-the-art interventions (giving food, medicines, books, etc.). Additionally, enough incremental improvement might reach a tipping point where the poverty/coordination trap can be escaped, and the global equilibrium shifts.
marmot777 10y ago
Acting as you suggest and programs like this aren't mutually exclusive propositions. I doubt that the people backing this program are the same people selling arms to Africa. So nobody should do anything unless they can also solve all problems? I actually upvoted your comment because I agree that those things should stop but I don't have the slightest bit of power to stop it and those who are conducting these sort of studies have more power than me but when put up against giant problems, it's at the margins. That is, they can't stop the arms trade either.
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  My problem is that programs like this does not change anything except making us first world citizens feeling comfortable about not having the power to stop exploitation of a whole continent. It is like a drug for the society making us feel good when we should feel bad and ashamed. And calling it "basic income" is just propaganda.
  - marmot777 10y ago
    I don't think that's the point. This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions. If this concept proves viable, then that could serve as a model to scale it up. The problem this is trying to solve isn't that of just the developing world, the developed world is sliding toward a catastrophic failure of the system that depends on there being a job (aka a way to make a living) for every adult who wants to work. I'm not sure but we could be there now. If we aren't there now it won't be long. The trend toward automation and the rise of AI are enough on its own but there are other trends working against the current system. Add to that even for people who have steady work how well has the retirement saving system been going in the U.S.? There are millions of people who will retire completely unprepared to support themselves for even a decade of retirement. The need will be global. Unless you're wealthy enough to have no worries at all about money, you might someday be grateful for these initial tests that led to the successful deployment of this system for you. I know I worry about how many years I can make it into retirement when that day comes and I really worry about my son who's a small child. The system is failing yet slow enough that perhaps it hasn't hit you yet. Actually, even if you ARE wealthy, if the system becomes too unstable ultimately we all eat it. Instability is everyone's adversary.

woodandsteel 10y ago

It's interesting how this runs counter to the two dominant political ideologies in the US. Liberals believe that the poor are too dumb and helpless to figure out what they want, so the government should do it, both domestically and in foreign aid. Conservatives believe that the poor are poor because they are unintelligent and lack good values (or they are acting rationally in response to liberal welfare programs), and domestic and foreign programs should be eliminated in favor of religious missions. What programs like this are finding is the the poor are intelligent and well-motivated, and they just need an opportunity to get out of the hole they are stuck in. Let me add that, from what I understand, foreign aid programs can be very helpful in areas like public health.

marmot777 10y ago
This program doesn't have an ideology I don't think nor does it make assumptions about people. Give people money and some will work on top of it to live higher, some will write a novel, some will devote themselves to building software. And yes some will sit around taking bong hits and eating Cheetos. It does not matter to me as none of these is likely to hurt others. Where someone is using this money to hurt others we have laws as imperfect as they are. Humans will always be imperfect and society will always be imperfect as an understatement.
nostrademons 10y ago
I think it's important to realize that there are many causes of poverty, ranging from political to cultural to infrastructure to capital. What programs like GiveDirectly and the Grameen Bank's operations in Bangladesh are finding is that when the limiting factor is lack of money, giving people money helps, a lot. There are other places in the world where the limiting factor is that if you give people money, some warlord will come in with guns and take it away. There are other places where if you give money, the local villagers will drink it away. There are still other places where you can give money and people will use it productively to grow more crops, and then the crops will rot in the fields because the transportation infrastructure to transport them to where they're needed doesn't exist. In places like Kenya or Bangladesh where there is relatively peace, a relatively industrious culture, and the know-how to profitably invest capital, giving money helps. In other places - DRC for example, or rural Peru - the money just gets redistributed to people who will use it to keep the locals down.

ImTalking 10y ago

Anything that reduces the oppression of women is a good thing. Freedom is the ability to make choices.

returnbuyer 10y ago
Women are not oppressed in America, they are in Islamic countries though. Somehow the solution to that is to import more Islam. Hm.
- DanBC 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

jayajay 10y ago

If every known resource acquisition task was automated, and the discovery of unknown non-automated tasks could be automated to be automated, we'd be post-scarcity and the concepts of working and income wouldn't be useful metrics anymore. So, yeah machines are a big black hole and our jobs are doomed asteroids spiraling into the black hole. As they spiral into the singularity, humans will be displaced at an accelerating rate, and it will take more ingenuity and effort for humans to maintain "work". And, for what? In the asymptotic limit, the outcome should be no more jobs and "work" in a the way we currently define them, and humans will be truly free to creative pursuits. Never shall a beautiful human mind be wasted on labor which a machine can do. At some point, machines will be the dominant species pushing civilization forward, not us. Until then, we're forced to work, we're forced into employment because our world does not simply give us what we want. Food and spears don't fall out of the sky, so we will waste our time hunting and farming until we figure out how to make those things "fall out of the sky".

temp-ora 10y ago

the title does not reflect the article and the article does not reflect the subject. like everyone else here, i did not read it because after dangling a few hard facts and conclusions in front of your face, the article goes off on tangents about the personal stories of people who are involved but not instrumental. this toxic mix of novel-style story telling and actual reporting has made these articles unreadable for me. people dont give a shit about the narrative of the stupid author or even people involved in setting up this whole thing -- people want to know how the experiment went! did it work? did the people end up being lazy and unproductive like all the ubi detractors say they will? but no, i cannot know these things without fishing through pages of garbage. and when i know someone else has already done it here in the comments to reap the karma, why on earth would i even click the link?

temp-ora 10y ago

we do not use money because it makes sense. money exists in the form it takes today because of human nature. we think someone has to earn their food. we think a homeless person deserves a handout because they look like they are at least trying to get on their feet (or not when they dont). machine intelligence is not the only problem that our wealth distribution system is facing. we have faced massive inequality before, and are facing it right now, and no solutions have been implemented. and like all the trials of equality before it, the automation of jobs will result in the smartest and fasted humans owning the vast majority of wealth and influence while the rest of us sit in mud.

chillwaves 10y ago
> the automation of jobs will result in the smartest and fasted humans owning the vast majority of wealth and influence while the rest of us sit in mud. So you are arguing the rich are rich because they are the smartest? I would tweak your assessment. The rich are rich because wealth perpetuates the capture of wealth at a rate greater than the expansion of the economy.
- temp-ora 10y ago
  having wealth is one half of the equation when it comes to self perpetuation of wealth. being very smart is the other half. look at people who win the lottery. they spend it all away, often becoming broke. and the people who get wealth in the first place are more likely to be smart. smart people end up getting a lot of money because they are smart. and they use it to stay wealthy because they are smart.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Can someone summarize the results?

praetorian84 10y ago

Interesting comment below the article regarding a government-run programme in Brazil trying something similar: "However, there is a trend of the part of these persons become dependent of this benefit and do not strive to change this situation..." That was my immediate reaction after reading this. What about after the twelve years, when the donors ride off into the sunset? There are some encouraging stories there of participants using the money wisely, but not all will do so. You could argue that nobody is forcing them to participate, but it does seem at least a little ethically questionable. Particularly given the targeted demographic of a rural Kenyan community with (presumably - I could be wrong) low education levels.

PeterStuer 10y ago
If this solves their basic needs, housing, food, medical, education, ..., then why would they need to 'strive for change"? Seems to me the world would be a far better place if people could get more content with just living. We have no shortage of produce already, and that is before the automation revolutions coming in the next decades. Just living without exponential 'wealth' accumulation plans that invariably seem to include some form of over-exploiting natural resources while externalizing the effects, or rent-seeking schemes that create lopsided distributions, seems to be a far more 'civil' future.

WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

Giving money is a great short term solution but we all know that free always has a limit. 22 dollars per month is a good start but at 22 bux they will never reach the standard of living we enjoy in the west. The goal should be to ensure that everyone has a job or business that provides the person a decent living. I think that in addition to the money they should help with the following: 1)Education and the ability to get it at will. Financial education should be a priority. 2)Entrepreneurship, make sure anyone that wants to start a business knows what to do. 3)Security and the enforcement of the law thru a judicial system, both criminal and civil. 4)A working financial system. Make sure businesses and people can borrow money. 5)A way to go bankrupt that will let people start over. It should not be too painful for both creditors and borrowers. 6)A political system that works for the majority. 7) Community leadership that works towards the betterment of the town. 8)A tax system that will let the town provide items that no single person can provide on their own. It's a reality as painful as they are taxes and their prudent use help improve the community's standard of living. 9) Secure property rights. If someone owns something they should do with it what they want without infringing on the community's well being and no one should be able to take it away from them by force. What gets me railed up is the inability to use the town's human capital. Giving free money will not help forever. If you could get people to work together they would eventually get out of poverty. Maybe the current generation might not but eventually they would be able to do it.

chvid 10y ago

As a form of foreign aid giving money directly probably works well. But idea that developing countries need basic income because of automation is just absurd. If anything they need to get to work developing their country; those shacks are not going to be built by robots. Fully developed countries on the other hand may face the situation where their country is so well run and have such a high level of automation and specialisation that there is too little work left for the population to be fully employed. And thus they may lower their pension age, experiment with 30 hour work weeks, sabbaticals, maternity leaves, basic income and so on. The countries that are closest to this are probably the Scandinavian countries. However at the moment they are all moving towards lower social transfers and higher pension age.

Razengan 10y ago

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth. Don't want so many disgruntled and unemployed people? Endorse some form of guaranteed income, or incorporate basic housing, meals, healthcare and internet into the list of undeniable human rights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator

alexryan 10y ago
As long as important problems remained unsolved and human desires remain unfulfilled there will be opportunities to contribute.
cannonpr 10y ago
I do wonder about the "not everyone can contribute" perhaps they can't contribute in building cars, but with a cultural shift and education, well there are a lot of avenues of research and mathematics that only require thought and basic tools like chalk. I tend to view an unemployed human as an awful waste of computational resources. This ofcourse assumes we haven't figured out strong AÍ or we don't want to, cause that's an entirely different chat.
- manmal 10y ago
  Yes. We are made to be active (non-passive), so most people will choose to do _anything_ anyway. Might as well something that furthers our objectives.
- jsemrau 10y ago
  I have been building houses in Indonesia and other parts of South East Asia and there is ample need for people who can build stuff and teach things.

agumonkey 10y ago

Work will have to be redefined. It's a psychological need to form teams and solve your needs or some others. That is the underlying basis.

Sir_Substance 10y ago

This is a nice article, but I'd like to remind everyone that it's probably also native advertising.

exolymph 10y ago
The New York Times discloses their native advertising. Also, I doubt that GiveDirectly has the budget for a $100k+ media campaign.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

compareglobal 10y ago

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askafriend 10y ago
I can't tell if this is satire or spam - I guess that's the hallmark of good satire.

markiniotome 10y ago

I don't get it. Do they expect that smart people will work and pay huge taxes and the rest can just stay home and receive money for doing nothing? Working people can just move abroad and avoid paying those taxes.

anovikov 10y ago

This looks so shiny only because the experiment is low-scale. In a country with an acute shortage of access to capital, small money explainably gives huge returns. If it was done to every, or even every poor, household in Kenya, it won't have resulted in anything but inflation and probably riots/genocide/burning of Give Directly workers for witchcraft. If everyone could buy that fishnet, fish in Lake Victoria will run out in a month, and almost everyone who did that will have simply lost that money. Further advancement will need a ton of capital AND education, and tradition of legal system to sustain complex companies that depend on intangible assets... Simply put, require a first world country to be done in. Handing out $22 a month to every Kenyan would do absolutely nothing for him - at least many times less than handing out $22 to 0.01% of Kenyans. It's not like i don't believe in UBI. There are few other visible solutions to the automation problem (other may be economic incentivizing - like through tax breaks - and cultural promotion of resurrection of personal servants as a mass occupation) - but it can't work as good as this example simply because it doesn't scale so well.

snarf21 10y ago
This is the thing that irritates me soo much. People come up with an idea that doing X will solve problem Y but they ignore the fact you can't just change one simple thing in a complex system and not expect other variations. Giving everyone in the country X dollars will just result in inflation like you said. Plus, it will take wealth away from those people who had wealth currently make up to a small multiple of this new income. Adding access to clean water, plumbing and electricity is enabling and the kind of investment that will have the most return. Returns can also be had by starting to give access to credit/loans to enterprising people. I liken this issue to Democracy. You can't give a country Democracy but you can help create conditions for its citizens to build it themselves. But there is also a chance that they don't want it.

nrdwavexe 10y ago

Why is "defining a problem called 'not working'" not called "massively manipulating the economy"? From the point of view of the people who work hard to make Kenya's economy work, this can't possibly be helpful. It sounds like an evil, abusive psychological experiment. Forget about "fake news", the New York Times is literally evil news. It is literally promoting views that proliferate evil. Injecting this level of disorder into an economy and lying about it is a level of deception that goes into moral perversion. Let me make this clear: I am directly accusing Annie Lowrey of promoting excessively morally corrupt views. She is responsible for promoting evil. This is a person who wakes up in the morning and works hard to promote evil. Think about that. Edit: I was down-voted without explanation or rebuttal. If you disagree with what I have written, don't attack my anonymously. I want my karma to be a healthy score, and I don't appreciate people (or bots) decreasing my karma score, and I consider it a personal attack against my reputation.

grzm 10y ago
This is all speculation, but from what I've observed on HN there could be a number of reasons you were downvoted. - HN isn't primarily for political or ideological debate. Creating a new account and starting with a contentious comment probably looked like someone creating an account purely for ideological battle, which is an abuse of HN. - The HN community strongly values civil discourse, which usually requires keeping strong, passionate, strident language at a lower level, particularly on contentious issues. Phrases like "literally evil news", "literally promoting views that proliferate evil", and "moral perversion" don't meet the expectation of civil discourse, regardless of how strongly you believe them to be true. (Yes, this is "it's not what you say, it's how you say it".) - You've made a direct, harsh attack on someone without providing any support. - After receiving downvotes, you complained about it. This is explicitly against HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html As I stated from the outset, this is speculation. For what people would consider obvious disregard for community standards, they may downvote and not think it's necessary to comment why. As you express concern about your karma, as you're new to commenting on HN, I suggest refraining from commenting on contentious topics for a while until you become more accustomed to the HN community. There are plenty of other interesting submissions that you may find to contribute to and not find yourself as open to downvotes. I'm sorry you've found your first brush with the HN community to be negative. I hope you find what I've written useful and that you have a more positive experience in the future!

karmakaze 10y ago

Sounds like a great programme with little reported short-term negative effects. By no way is this a beta test to anything other than reproducing this in other similar cultural conditions, which may also require having seen previous aid attempts fail. The worst-case scenario I fear is that UBI given without also providing outlets for activities that actually get used will result in an adult version of problem of otherwise well-off of suburban youth.

prestonpesek 10y ago

In order for this to work, you have to define "universal" in the context of how automation affects the global economy, not just the US or any national economy. Example: are we going to send a stipend to Bengali citizens who are displaced from textile manufacturing jobs by robot factories in the U.S.?