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It'll be really interesting to see how this basic income thing plays out over the next few decades. Basic income is most easily testable in small, high income,

It'll be really interesting to see how this basic income thing plays out over the next few decades. Basic income is most easily testable in small, high income, relatively homogeneous societies that agree on a more communal way of governing. So, the Nordic countries, see Finland. What is most interesting is how many optimistic and as yet untested claims that basic income advocates make. See this article. Paragraph after paragraph about how this program will work, what the advantages will be, but we don't really have any hard numbers, and even once we get them in a limited setting in Finland, or with random people across the US, we have studies that aren't generalizable, and we have very few. If n=29 means anything in this context, we've got like 2.5 (not a rigorously considered statement, don't hurt me). The really cynical part of me notices how basic income is like the ideal political promise. "Hey, we're gonna give you money so you don't have to work, and when we do, society is gonna transform into utopia". We'll all be living in Truman Burbank's world, apparently. Because of course people won't squander their basic income (maybe on Bitcoin?) and if they do, so much for a social safety net. The general populace (not those at the top) are seeing a bad economic situation, so of course their response is yes, meanwhile the people who are the biggest proponents of this as of currently are people like Altman, Zuckerberg, and Musk. The first two have political ambitions, the last is a utopian. Of course when you break down the numbers, it doesn't work. How do you make up the 3 trillion a year it would take to give everyone $12k when you almost had healthcare repealed? What programs do you decide to cut and how do you expect the two parties to have a fruitful discussion about it (lol)? These guys will never talk about any rigorous plans because they don't have any that would make it through legislation. They also won't talk about how crushing and depressing and difficult it is to live on 12k (they have no clue). It sounds like a future where the super rich throw pennies to the peasants and at that point it'll be a great excuse. We give you money, why can't you pull yourself up by your bootstraps? Will someone lay out a realistic plan detailing how you'd implement BI in the US?

jquery 9y ago
Good post, but nothing to do with the article. Excerpt: "The state will have difficulties in replacing the huge reductions in income tax returns with other forms of taxation. But there are also other things that the nation state can continue to tax in the future. For example, property consumption and different steering taxes aimed at changing people’s behaviour, are possible new avenues of income. There are considerable opportunities in steering taxes, as the data available and ideological resistance against absolute bans increase their importance. The heightened discussion in recent years about the expansion of tax co-operation between nations could also lead to actions that strengthens the tax base in the future global and digitalised economy." I think we've all been duped into upvoting a completely AI-generated article based on a catchy title and a bunch of positive fluff thrown in.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  The problem is that's very light on specifics. It's a bunch of hand wavvy suggestions about how we'll figure it out. The entire article had that kind of fluffiness to it, as do most discussions of basic income. These substanceless articles get posted over and over again and heavily upvoted and discussed in various places. I'm honestly hoping for something with more content, which is why I posted that. I'm guess if I'm making obvious errors in logic, someone will point them out.
  - jquery 9y ago
    Yeah, I think there are real discussions to be had about basic income. I'm extremely skeptical of it, I don't see how welfare without any means-testing is politically sustainable long-term. So we'll have welfare on top of it, and the cycle repeats. That said, do you agree the article was written by AI? Try to read it again. It reads like a markov chain of ideas loosely chained together.
    - yolio 9y ago
      Me too, I don't see how something that assumes a lot of good faith is going to work when many countries have trouble with popular support for their current restrictive and measurably effective programs. The only way I see it happening is with some sort of sovereign wealth fund. But that usually requires control of a resource or technology. Which most countries don't have anymore and probably won't have for many decades.
- Noos 9y ago
  Also in the article: "With digitalisation, increasingly precise data is recorded about almost all activities. In other words, our activities are registered and measured in more and more detail. In principle, this opens an entirely new opportunity to tax, for example, work performances and collect payments for the use of different commodities such as roads. Thanks to digitalisation, all exchanges in society can be made transparent and taxed fairly in real time. " Basic income as the smokescreen for an invasive state panopticon that uses taxes to monitor and control personal behavior will be the result, more or less.
jv22222 9y ago
Perhaps some kind of education or support along with the free money could be beneficial?
inopinatus 9y ago
Replace existing monetary policy (that creates money by buying securities from investment banks) with BI. The incumbent beneficiaries will fight it tooth and nail, of course.
memeCrasher 9y ago
I can already tell you how and why it will be bad: By living on a basic income provided to you by the government, you become dependent. That dependency is a weakness that gives the government greater power over you. What recourse do you have if the government removes your basic income? If we eliminate all other forms of income, say via automation, so there are no jobs you could turn to - what choice do you have? Go on to a rural agrarian existence, or die? What delightful power and leverage a basic income gives the government over its population.
- petra 9y ago
  Automation fully reduces the power of citizens, by making them economically useless, not BI. It's probably the thing we need to fight, somehow.
  - neon_electro 9y ago
    Do you believe automation can have no net benefit for society, then? Is there no future where increasingly all of the basic needs of people can be taken care of by automation, freeing up humans to do creative work? I would like to understand your viewpoint.
    - louithethrid 9y ago
      We are medieval creatures, we long for a purpose, no matter how small, no matter how trivial. If the machines take the purpose, all the fruit-baskets in the world wont fill that hole.
      - neon_electro 9y ago
        Is "machines taking all the purpose" a logical conclusion? I don't see a future where machines will create all of the popular culture in the world. I choose to support human-powered culture now, and increasing automation would not change my mind on that. A UBI would enable humans to do more work that society either can't or won't automate. Care of other humans is an example. Yes, machines may be able to take on some of that role, but never all of it.
petra 9y ago
The reality is that if you want to cover everyone's basic needs with $12K, you need to radically reduce the cost of goods and services. How ? That's the conversation we should be having. But that than becomes a painful and complex conversation, talking about huge changes in the structure and possibly quality of real-estate, healthcare, transportation and roads, universities, etc and maybe some core tenets of capitalism. But there's no way for this conversation to be fruitful and have really big changes - until we have a real crisis - because that's how democracies work in general. but here's a starting point, anyway: 1. Transforming real-estate, from a system largely aimed at profits, into a system that is focused on offering decent living conditions as cheaply as possible. 2. Inserting disruptive innovation and real cost reduction into healthcare. And yes, like all disruptive innovation , it probably means lowering quality, at least for some time.
- p1esk 9y ago
  you need to radically reduce the cost of goods and services. How ? Automation.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    The US free market has been very successful at radically reducing the cost of goods and services. Where it has failed to do so are in areas that are not free market, like health care.
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      It seems like the health care system has been gamed in the USA so that health insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies get a huge profit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this is the case anywhere in Western Europe/Canada or most other countries that have a functional health care.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        The massive regulation and government interference in health care in the US has definitely resulted in companies gaming it for profit. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame... https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Frech/dp/0844738840 https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre... https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-Amendments-Evaluative/dp/0844731285 https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...
nawitus 9y ago
> Because of course people won't squander their basic income (maybe on Bitcoin?) and if they do, so much for a social safety net. Why don't people do it on existing benefits?
sheepmullet 9y ago
> They also won't talk about how crushing and depressing and difficult it is to live on 12k (they have no clue). Ignoring medical for a second - $12k/year is actually not bad in many parts of the US. In fact many college students get by on less for living expenses and have a great time to boot. The struggle and depression comes from being unable to better yourself and in many cases actually hurting your health etc in the process.
jokoon 9y ago
To me UBI is basically a simplification of how paperwork is done, and how things are paid and what is paid. It doesn't mean the state gives more money overall. People and companies pay taxes, which are then redistributed across each other. There are several department who take care of all that money. It's immensely complicated. The accounting of all that is horrific. The UBI stems from the negative income tax, meaning that instead of paying X and getting paid Y, the government just make a calculation and you get a result of what you owe or are owed. One could go even further than that and consider salaries. If everyone gets the UBI, that means companies only have to pay for the difference in salary, and the state pays the rest. Company taxes may increase, but they would have to pay much less in salary, so it evens out. Overall the UBI might seem a little utopian, but the goal is to make things simpler in term of paperwork so that people don't end up with nothing when their paperwork is not in order. It would also make it much, much easier for everyone to understand who pays what and why. Tax accounting is awful. The negative income tax tries to levy this problem. But in general, I totally agree with you, implementing the UBI is a gigantic project that has huge consequences, both political and economical. I don't know how it would be done, because I know nothing about tax accounting and the legislation around it. But at least that means there is are work to do and a will to do it, so that's a good start.
rsync 9y ago
"Will someone lay out a realistic plan detailing how you'd implement BI in the US?" I have been open-minded about BI, however, the so-called "opioid crisis" in the United States has made me more skeptical. The accounts I have read in books and periodicals have confirmed my own experience growing up in a poor, semi-rural town: poor whites in the United States already have resources that are effectively equal, or greater than the basic incomes being proposed. Poor white people in rural America have a roof over their heads (perhaps not their own) they have some amount of disposable income (walmart, unemployment, disability, whatever) and they almost always have access to grandmas Buick or dads Chevy truck. They are very likely to be obese. These people killing themselves with Heroin have food and shelter and cars. Their problem is that there is no point to their lives. They have no narrative to attach themselves to and no meaning to their days. I don't see how Basic Income solves this, since they have what amounts to a (admittedly, precarious and haphazard) basic income already.

jquery 9y ago

Good post, but nothing to do with the article. Excerpt: "The state will have difficulties in replacing the huge reductions in income tax returns with other forms of taxation. But there are also other things that the nation state can continue to tax in the future. For example, property consumption and different steering taxes aimed at changing people’s behaviour, are possible new avenues of income. There are considerable opportunities in steering taxes, as the data available and ideological resistance against absolute bans increase their importance. The heightened discussion in recent years about the expansion of tax co-operation between nations could also lead to actions that strengthens the tax base in the future global and digitalised economy." I think we've all been duped into upvoting a completely AI-generated article based on a catchy title and a bunch of positive fluff thrown in.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
The problem is that's very light on specifics. It's a bunch of hand wavvy suggestions about how we'll figure it out. The entire article had that kind of fluffiness to it, as do most discussions of basic income. These substanceless articles get posted over and over again and heavily upvoted and discussed in various places. I'm honestly hoping for something with more content, which is why I posted that. I'm guess if I'm making obvious errors in logic, someone will point them out.
- jquery 9y ago
  Yeah, I think there are real discussions to be had about basic income. I'm extremely skeptical of it, I don't see how welfare without any means-testing is politically sustainable long-term. So we'll have welfare on top of it, and the cycle repeats. That said, do you agree the article was written by AI? Try to read it again. It reads like a markov chain of ideas loosely chained together.
  - yolio 9y ago
    Me too, I don't see how something that assumes a lot of good faith is going to work when many countries have trouble with popular support for their current restrictive and measurably effective programs. The only way I see it happening is with some sort of sovereign wealth fund. But that usually requires control of a resource or technology. Which most countries don't have anymore and probably won't have for many decades.
Noos 9y ago
Also in the article: "With digitalisation, increasingly precise data is recorded about almost all activities. In other words, our activities are registered and measured in more and more detail. In principle, this opens an entirely new opportunity to tax, for example, work performances and collect payments for the use of different commodities such as roads. Thanks to digitalisation, all exchanges in society can be made transparent and taxed fairly in real time. " Basic income as the smokescreen for an invasive state panopticon that uses taxes to monitor and control personal behavior will be the result, more or less.

jv22222 9y ago

Perhaps some kind of education or support along with the free money could be beneficial?

inopinatus 9y ago

Replace existing monetary policy (that creates money by buying securities from investment banks) with BI. The incumbent beneficiaries will fight it tooth and nail, of course.

memeCrasher 9y ago

I can already tell you how and why it will be bad: By living on a basic income provided to you by the government, you become dependent. That dependency is a weakness that gives the government greater power over you. What recourse do you have if the government removes your basic income? If we eliminate all other forms of income, say via automation, so there are no jobs you could turn to - what choice do you have? Go on to a rural agrarian existence, or die? What delightful power and leverage a basic income gives the government over its population.

petra 9y ago
Automation fully reduces the power of citizens, by making them economically useless, not BI. It's probably the thing we need to fight, somehow.
- neon_electro 9y ago
  Do you believe automation can have no net benefit for society, then? Is there no future where increasingly all of the basic needs of people can be taken care of by automation, freeing up humans to do creative work? I would like to understand your viewpoint.
  - louithethrid 9y ago
    We are medieval creatures, we long for a purpose, no matter how small, no matter how trivial. If the machines take the purpose, all the fruit-baskets in the world wont fill that hole.
    - neon_electro 9y ago
      Is "machines taking all the purpose" a logical conclusion? I don't see a future where machines will create all of the popular culture in the world. I choose to support human-powered culture now, and increasing automation would not change my mind on that. A UBI would enable humans to do more work that society either can't or won't automate. Care of other humans is an example. Yes, machines may be able to take on some of that role, but never all of it.

petra 9y ago

The reality is that if you want to cover everyone's basic needs with $12K, you need to radically reduce the cost of goods and services. How ? That's the conversation we should be having. But that than becomes a painful and complex conversation, talking about huge changes in the structure and possibly quality of real-estate, healthcare, transportation and roads, universities, etc and maybe some core tenets of capitalism. But there's no way for this conversation to be fruitful and have really big changes - until we have a real crisis - because that's how democracies work in general. but here's a starting point, anyway: 1. Transforming real-estate, from a system largely aimed at profits, into a system that is focused on offering decent living conditions as cheaply as possible. 2. Inserting disruptive innovation and real cost reduction into healthcare. And yes, like all disruptive innovation , it probably means lowering quality, at least for some time.

p1esk 9y ago
you need to radically reduce the cost of goods and services. How ? Automation.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  The US free market has been very successful at radically reducing the cost of goods and services. Where it has failed to do so are in areas that are not free market, like health care.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    It seems like the health care system has been gamed in the USA so that health insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies get a huge profit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this is the case anywhere in Western Europe/Canada or most other countries that have a functional health care.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      The massive regulation and government interference in health care in the US has definitely resulted in companies gaming it for profit. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame... https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Frech/dp/0844738840 https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre... https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-Amendments-Evaluative/dp/0844731285 https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...

nawitus 9y ago

> Because of course people won't squander their basic income (maybe on Bitcoin?) and if they do, so much for a social safety net. Why don't people do it on existing benefits?

sheepmullet 9y ago

> They also won't talk about how crushing and depressing and difficult it is to live on 12k (they have no clue). Ignoring medical for a second - $12k/year is actually not bad in many parts of the US. In fact many college students get by on less for living expenses and have a great time to boot. The struggle and depression comes from being unable to better yourself and in many cases actually hurting your health etc in the process.

jokoon 9y ago

To me UBI is basically a simplification of how paperwork is done, and how things are paid and what is paid. It doesn't mean the state gives more money overall. People and companies pay taxes, which are then redistributed across each other. There are several department who take care of all that money. It's immensely complicated. The accounting of all that is horrific. The UBI stems from the negative income tax, meaning that instead of paying X and getting paid Y, the government just make a calculation and you get a result of what you owe or are owed. One could go even further than that and consider salaries. If everyone gets the UBI, that means companies only have to pay for the difference in salary, and the state pays the rest. Company taxes may increase, but they would have to pay much less in salary, so it evens out. Overall the UBI might seem a little utopian, but the goal is to make things simpler in term of paperwork so that people don't end up with nothing when their paperwork is not in order. It would also make it much, much easier for everyone to understand who pays what and why. Tax accounting is awful. The negative income tax tries to levy this problem. But in general, I totally agree with you, implementing the UBI is a gigantic project that has huge consequences, both political and economical. I don't know how it would be done, because I know nothing about tax accounting and the legislation around it. But at least that means there is are work to do and a will to do it, so that's a good start.

rsync 9y ago

"Will someone lay out a realistic plan detailing how you'd implement BI in the US?" I have been open-minded about BI, however, the so-called "opioid crisis" in the United States has made me more skeptical. The accounts I have read in books and periodicals have confirmed my own experience growing up in a poor, semi-rural town: poor whites in the United States already have resources that are effectively equal, or greater than the basic incomes being proposed. Poor white people in rural America have a roof over their heads (perhaps not their own) they have some amount of disposable income (walmart, unemployment, disability, whatever) and they almost always have access to grandmas Buick or dads Chevy truck. They are very likely to be obese. These people killing themselves with Heroin have food and shelter and cars. Their problem is that there is no point to their lives. They have no narrative to attach themselves to and no meaning to their days. I don't see how Basic Income solves this, since they have what amounts to a (admittedly, precarious and haphazard) basic income already.