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That is a general problem with universal basic income schemes. Unless technology and automation is advanced enough to provide goods and services for basics need

by danbruc 10y ago

That is a general problem with universal basic income schemes. Unless technology and automation is advanced enough to provide goods and services for basics needs without requiring any labor at all, the scheme will fail in the worst case, i.e. everyone decides to stop working. And there is not much you can do against that, at best you can devise an incentive structure that makes it unlikely that you will hit the worst case scenario. But without robots doing all the work, there is no way such a scheme can work unconditionally no matter how the people are deciding to live their lives.

dllthomas 10y ago
> Unless technology and automation is advanced enough to provide goods and services for basics needs without requiring any labor at all, the scheme will fail in the worst case, i.e. everyone decides to stop working. I mean, of course the scheme will fail if everyone stops working. But if not enough people are working to make enough stuff to satisfy demand, you'll see inflation, the BI will fall below someone's comfort level, and they'll get to work. This assumes you don't peg the BI to actual or expected inflation - don't do that! (Another way of phrasing this - In theory a scheme can be unconditional in nominal terms while allowed to float in real terms, and ideally the feedback will allow us to keep real value distributed at some optimal level based on what society can bear. Whether that can translate into practice is an open question.)
- danbruc 9y ago
  If you understand it this way, then why wouldn't my original example be sufficient? The incentive structure might be really bad, but once you start starving you should certainly consider working again. Actually it seems almost everything would be workable in this way. Unless you structure a system in a way that it is simply unable to produce the required goods and services or makes access to them impossible for at least some, then at some ultimate point life threatening forces will set the incentives. In reality, I guess, people would just overthrow your shitty system or circumvent it with black markets. So after thinking a bit longer about this, the requirements given in the initial comment seem not to be as straight forward as they may appear at first. What does sustainable mean? Is it sustainable if we make use of hunger to convince people to work? Is it implementable at the current population level if it entails something that the current population would never accept, say for ideological or religious reasons?
  - dllthomas 9y ago
    > once you start starving you should certainly consider working again Free-rider problem, and the black (or gray) market. If all the value I capture from working is one/population of the value I produce, there are probably other things I can do (in an environment with a population bigger than "really small village") that will do substantially more to improve my circumstances, whether legal or not (and some things are bound to be legal - consider a kind of analog of the "man who marries his housekeeper" objection to GDP). And when people are desperate, they are more likely to focus on the things that will most improve their circumstance (especially in the shortest term).
maxerickson 10y ago
Plus a meteor might blow up the planet. The unconditional in unconditional basic income has a softer meaning than you use; it mostly just means that the payments are made regardless of wealth and other income (of course in a large number of cases it would also be completely recovered by taxation).

by danbruc 10y ago

dllthomas 10y ago

> Unless technology and automation is advanced enough to provide goods and services for basics needs without requiring any labor at all, the scheme will fail in the worst case, i.e. everyone decides to stop working. I mean, of course the scheme will fail if everyone stops working. But if not enough people are working to make enough stuff to satisfy demand, you'll see inflation, the BI will fall below someone's comfort level, and they'll get to work. This assumes you don't peg the BI to actual or expected inflation - don't do that! (Another way of phrasing this - In theory a scheme can be unconditional in nominal terms while allowed to float in real terms, and ideally the feedback will allow us to keep real value distributed at some optimal level based on what society can bear. Whether that can translate into practice is an open question.)

danbruc 9y ago
If you understand it this way, then why wouldn't my original example be sufficient? The incentive structure might be really bad, but once you start starving you should certainly consider working again. Actually it seems almost everything would be workable in this way. Unless you structure a system in a way that it is simply unable to produce the required goods and services or makes access to them impossible for at least some, then at some ultimate point life threatening forces will set the incentives. In reality, I guess, people would just overthrow your shitty system or circumvent it with black markets. So after thinking a bit longer about this, the requirements given in the initial comment seem not to be as straight forward as they may appear at first. What does sustainable mean? Is it sustainable if we make use of hunger to convince people to work? Is it implementable at the current population level if it entails something that the current population would never accept, say for ideological or religious reasons?
- dllthomas 9y ago
  > once you start starving you should certainly consider working again Free-rider problem, and the black (or gray) market. If all the value I capture from working is one/population of the value I produce, there are probably other things I can do (in an environment with a population bigger than "really small village") that will do substantially more to improve my circumstances, whether legal or not (and some things are bound to be legal - consider a kind of analog of the "man who marries his housekeeper" objection to GDP). And when people are desperate, they are more likely to focus on the things that will most improve their circumstance (especially in the shortest term).

maxerickson 10y ago

Plus a meteor might blow up the planet. The unconditional in unconditional basic income has a softer meaning than you use; it mostly just means that the payments are made regardless of wealth and other income (of course in a large number of cases it would also be completely recovered by taxation).