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Experiment in paying villagers in India an unconditional basic income

267 points by xSwag 13y ago

r00fus 13y ago
The opposite of austerity. I liked this part: Direct cash payments cut out the many leaks and corrupt intermediaries. Delawa said: “The idea of unconditional income comes from the failure of conditional programmes. As soon as there are conditions, there is erosion. Conditionality means intermediaries, which means power, which means corruption.” Corruption is the reason aid programs are so inefficient. By giving money directly to those impacted, the poor are empowered to save and concentrate their unconditional small wealth into larger pools and wield power of a sort.
- rubinelli 13y ago
  Even when corruption isn't an issue -- and it always is -- there is a lot of waste when some bureaucrat spends someone else's money. But this is their money, and they know exactly how much they would have to work to get it, so they spend on what they need. And this money makes the whole economy flow in their previously cash-starved communities. The effect can be astounding.
  - tellarin 13y ago
    Just look at Brazil's income distribution program: Bolsa Familia. It has been shown to improve local economies and people's lives. Even though it is not completely unconditional and doesn't quite get to provide enough for basic needs.
- mjn 13y ago
  That was the reason even Milton Friedman, otherwise pretty much the opposite of a socialist, though that a basic income was a good option even in western countries. His view was that just giving people unrestricted cash would cut out much of the corruption, inefficiency, and market distortion that creeps in once you start giving intermediaries the power to put conditions and restrictions on support. For example, with food stamps, he was skeptical that the restrictions requiring people to buy "proper" food with them produced better results overall than just giving people the equivalent amount in cash and letting them decide. For one thing, if individual recipients are choosing their food, rather than picking it from a list of food-stamp-approved choices, it completely removes the whole business of lobbying to be on the approved list, plus the bureaucracy of administering the list.
  - jasonwocky 13y ago
    The problem is that the economy is often seen as more than a mechanism for efficient allocation and transfer of resources: for many, it's also a source and enforcer of moral order. "People who work hard and play by the rules should have a shot at success. People who don't work shouldn't be given handouts. Corporations who misbehave shouldn't be bailed out, because they're just incented to misbehave again. We should drug test welfare recipients even though it ultimately costs us more than it saves us, because drug addicts shouldn't get welfare." etc etc etc.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      I'm not saying it's true, but in all of those cases it intuitively seems like a bad idea to encourage/not discourage those behaviors. Giving people handouts might give them an incentive not to work, giving corporations handouts lessens the incentive to not fail (and keeps the competitors which did better from gaining a larger market share), refusing drug addicts welfare might encourage them to get help, etc. I'm not saying these things are necessarily true, but it certainly seems reasonable if you don't know otherwise. The point being that it's not because people necessarily see these things as moral issues, but just possible incentive problems.
  - cadlin 13y ago
    I couldn't tell if you were implying this, but FYI in the US today food stamps can be used on any food item that isn't prepared (i.e. already cooked).
- john_w_t_b 13y ago
  Yes, I agree. Get rid of the conditions and pay people directly through bank transfers. The public should push for a basic income in developed countries also. A universal basic income would provide a safety net for entrepreneurs and make it easier for people to pursue education or high risk ventures. It would eliminate vast numbers of bureaucrats and lawyers from programs like US Disability. $1.5 billion was spent on disability lawyers in 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203518404577096632862007046.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020351840457709...) Governments could pay for a universal basic income with pollution taxes. The overall program would be revenue neutral. People would be discouraged from wasting energy (e.g. gasoline) to do low value work.
  - r00fus 13y ago
    Basic income and government healthcare would be amazing for freelancers and entrepreneurs. However all our politicians are owned by the corporatists. Effecting change like that seems asymptotic, unreachable.
    - john_w_t_b 13y ago
      Universal income should be popular as every voter would benefit. Alaska has a provident fund with payments to every resident. It might happen in Europe next as a backlash to the austerity programs in place now.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Austerity is perpendicular to this. You could very easily have a basic income but insist on a strict balanced budget, which would be austerity. You could also very easily have a basic income and a government deficit, which would be anti-austerity.
  - batemanesque 13y ago
    thank you for mentioning this. "austrian economics", for all its flaws, has little to do w/ current austerity policies
- notahacker 13y ago
  Direct payments on this scale don't solve the problem of rentiers that are able to extort the poor. Someone still has the power to directly hand out the cash, and record who has and hasn't received it. Someone still has the ability to dupe villagers into believing the cash payments are contingent upon his goodwill. And somebody still wields enough economic or social power over the villagers to direct most of the returns into his own pocket. The article itself pointed out the real problem with the villagers was that the local landlord owned their land and their debts - a local landlord with the ability to raise everyone's ground rent, increase the work requirements for debt service and appropriate most of the direct cash payment for himself. A compulsory purchase order served on the landlord, and/or some kind of rent control might well be a more effective long term solution to these villagers' long term needs - even though such schemes have obvious potential for bureaucratic abuse.
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EGreg 13y ago
To me, this sort of thing is common sense. All the austrian economics fans talking about better price signals as an argument for less regulation - all of them should consider using the same argument for giving an unconditional safety net to the poor. When a poker player has a small stack at a table, he makes poorer choices. Similarly, poor people cannot optimally use their resources, but must avoid one potential crisis after another. If you free them from the rat race, you can even end minimum wage. What I see in the USA for the past few years is really a class struggle manufactured by ideologues, people vilifying the rich, others vilifying the poor... but with increasing automation and outsourcing, more and more people will find themselves unemployed. If those people had money they'd spend it on basic necessities and the things they want the most. This in turn will empower those industries to produce more things people actually need, and innovate. Who knlows, maybe the poor will even be able to help fund solutions to their own challenges in their communities. Even Milton Friedman advocated for a negative tax.
- mjn 13y ago
  > All the austrian economics fans talking about better price signals as an argument for less regulation - all of them should consider using the same argument for giving an unconditional safety net to the poor. Interestingly, one of the founders of Austrian economics, F.A. Hayek, actually did argue for a minimum income: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html
  - scarmig 13y ago
    Libertarians often are big pushers of a minimum income, actually. It's far more direct and efficient as a means of improving the welfare of the least productive, and it's the least prone to special interests pushing for tax cuts because of how much their good helps kids/the poor/whatever. With a sufficient basic income, you could effectively get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public subsidies in all types of places they're unnecessary or harmful. And you remove the disincentive effect on productivity that most welfare schemes have. Most academic libertarians, in my experience, aren't of the sort that thinks private property rights is the sole criterion and sole justification for everything; their opposition to government activities is based a lot more on how it distorts price signals, public choice issues, and issues of implementation. The basic guaranteed income sidesteps all of those.
sciurus 13y ago
This has been tried in other places with positive results. http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/02/the-basic-income-grant-experiment-in-namibia/ http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/02/the-basic-income-grant-e...
laurentoget 13y ago
Le monde diplomatique is something i really miss about france. Love that someone is asking the real questions.
- mynameishere 13y ago
  I hear they have a website coming out.
tomjen3 13y ago
If you just start paying people money no matter if they work or not, what is their incentive to improve in life. Frankly, this smells of people trying to sneak communism in through the backdoor. And what do you do when they blow all their money on drugs (this will happen with some of them).
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  In theory, those who lead destructive lives (drugs) will die sooner (if the anti-drug claims are true) therefore removing themselves from the system. I'd imagine the payments in this case are only enough for food and shelter. Spending $ on drugs makes it harder to obtain the other two. Communism would be conditional income ("to each according to his means, etc."). What the article describes is unconditional.
  - mathieuh 13y ago
    Socialism would be conditional income, Full Communism would be unconditional.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  So basically, you don't know what communism is.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    To elaborate, communism aims for the abolition of private property and the elimination of class distinctions. BI aims for neither.
- funkaster 13y ago
  did you even read the article? My impression is that you did not read it, or did not even understood it. Also, you seem to have no idea what communism is about.
- sfmcjgkbrbm 13y ago
  In communism there is no private property. You can't run business or be employed in any. Minimum income is completely unrelated. It only means giving a few dollars for the poor so they don't starve or freeze to death. It's already done in developed countries (welfare) but in unreliable way. Minimum income doesn't interfere with free market and accumulation of capital.
Aloha 13y ago
I think the concept of the (Guaranteed Annual Income) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income is the most effective way to deliver social services. The overhead is much lower than welfare, WIC or food stamps, meaning it costs less, and more benefit actually makes it to the poor.
jmathai 13y ago
I believe this works when you give women money. My dad does this sort of work in India and we've had many conversations about how you can't trust men with free money.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  That is not sexist at all.
  - evolve2k 13y ago
    Context on why girls and women: http://www.girleffect.org/why-girls/#&panel1-1 http://www.girleffect.org/why-girls/#&panel1-1
    - jjoonathan 13y ago
      There's a difference between making up for an existing disparity (the site you linked claims it is doing this and I applaud them for their efforts) and creating a new one (e.g. differential BI). I don't think there is a single person here who would support giving BI preferentially to men, so when you proposed giving money to women we all assumed you meant giving it preferentially to women, because otherwise your statement would have simply been a restatement of what everyone else was saying. I object to the notion of giving BI preferentially to women, although I fully support the cause of ensuring they receive their share. Please clarify what you meant.
      - jmathai 13y ago
        This isn't about making up for existing disparity or some form of affirmative action ... it's simply that women seem to be the best investment if you want to impact change on future generations.
        ahk 13y ago
        Please watch this talk (by a woman) on such issues: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=3dwLzB0kFxI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D3dwLzB0kFxI http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=3dwLzB0kFxI&desktop_uri=%... Tl;dw: feminism and sexism has bad effects on society and it is a very big deal.
gmack 13y ago
Another great organization working on this model is http://givedirectly.org http://givedirectly.org, co-founded by the irrepressible Rohit Wanchoo. We had lots of discussion around this model, since his team had done a lot of research around it. It appears to be working well, and recently received a large donation from Google.
nn3 13y ago
"I’m going to save all the money I get and spend it on my son’s wedding.”" ... “But it’s a middle-class prejudice that the poor don’t know how to use money sensibly." I don't want to sound like a "middle class prejudiced person" but spending all the saved money on a wedding doesn't sound very sensible to me.
- mathieuh 13y ago
  Silly poor people thinking they can both survive and enjoy themselves a little, what nerve!
- sfmcjgkbrbm 13y ago
  Maybe it's not for one-day wedding ceremony, but for wedding gift that lasts for long time.
- deleted 13y ago
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- gruseom 13y ago
  You cherry-picked that example. (Plus took it out of context—the quote talks first about food and medicine.) But even granting the point completely, the presence of such outcomes in a scatterplot says nothing about whether the approach is beneficial or not on the whole. I find it exciting that this is at least partially amenable to objective experimentation. Why not try it and see? It takes a pretty rigid ideologue to not be open even to that much. (Not talking about you there, but about "they'll only spend it all on drugs" and so on.)
  - nn3 13y ago
    I don't think I misquoted. Yes I agree it's an interesting experiment and I like the idea in general. But the article certainly doesn't do a good job arguing for it by quoting that crazy lady and containing such obvious contradictions.
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michaelochurch 13y ago
What really gets me going is the realization of how much more value people would produce if they could own their lives outright instead of renting it from one boss to the next. There'd be less "work" of the traditional, low-productivity, subordinate zombie sense, but a lot more getting done. I want to see BI not because I have an interest in not working. Rather, I want it to free people to work. Work is too important (both as a human need, and as a productive force in society) to leave it in the hands of the entrenched boss men who currently own Work. It would be such an excuse-killer, too, to implement BI and get rid of compulsory labor. People could no longer justify making so little of their lives due to having to work. Now, it turns out to still be quite hard to make something of one's life but, when that excuse is gone, the only thing to say is "Yes, it's hard; but go on, do it." Sometimes I wonder, though, if we invented institutional Work to justify mediocrity, and make it OK. It's often portrayed as an oppression brought in by deceptive, aggressive Boss Men; but I also think people willingly participate because it's a way to substitute mediocre/subordinate social acceptance for the much more intermittent reward/thrill of genuine work. Boss men definitely were more principal in driving Work to its current state, but it was a coevolution.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Don't forget that it comes out of the excess of those who do decide to work. I'm not confident that if this was rolled out globally, there would be enough people who really decide to "make something of their lives" to support the system. Sure, a lot of them will hate themselves if they don't, but, honestly now, how often does that stop laziness? Don't look at yourself to answer, look at the culture.
  - EGreg 13y ago
    Studies show welfare spending has reduced poverty dramatically and measurably in ALL countries studied. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfares_effect_on_poverty http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfares_effect_on_poverty Other studies show, however, that it has diminishing returns, especially as it leads to poverty/ghetto culture. However this is changing with technology, internet and mobile phones. People are more docile than in the 90s with the gangsta rap craze.
dxbydt 13y ago
We issued $2000 per head debit cards during Katrina ( http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?s=3818003&clienttype=printable http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?s=3818003&clientty... ). These villagers have a Katrina every single day of their lives, so it makes sense.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  If it makes sense, that's not why. The reason we started giving people money during Katrina was precisely the change in their circumstances, not their steady-state condition. Suffering, at least the perception of it, is largely relative to previous experiences. Your comment is especially ironic given your username. ;)
temphn 13y ago
The thing about the basic guaranteed income is that it's not usually thought through beyond the first step. Let's extrapolate it out. Say you receive this income. What would you do? Perhaps you would go down to the store and purchase rice. The storekeeper has to work to manage the store, the truck driver drove the rice to market, and the rice farmer had to plant and harvest the rice. A portion of your rupee today goes to the storekeeper. But a portion also diffuses back to the driver and the rice farmer. Those signals are the signals for them to keep doing what they are doing. Yes, it's true that the storekeeper bought the rice in advance of your purchase, but if you look at this as an iterated purchase: in general money flows opposite the flow of goods/services. They accept your money today on the tacit belief that you have provided enough value to someone else, somewhere else that it will even out in the end when it is their turn to consume. However, if the state either takes money (via tax) or centrally creates money (via inflation) to give a "guaranteed basic income", it is essentially forcing the store owner, truck driver, and rice farmer to work for free. The monetary signal becomes broken and no longer signals that the person on the purchasing end has produced something in return for this rice. The shopkeeper, driver, and farmer don't have the vocabulary to articulate this in highfalutin', dispassionate tones. But they can understand that while they are slaving away at work, the person buying their rice is getting something for nothing. And that something is to a nontrivial extent coming directly out of their hide (in the form of taxes or monetary dilution). This is why the passive voice isn't so helpful here - "paying an unconditional basic income" takes away the role of agency. The state is taxing citizens and forcing them to provide services to people who aren't producing anything in return ("unconditional"). Different people have different definitions of justice, but many of those citizens will leave once they understand what is going on. After all, you would leave a company structured like that, which diluted down your equity or awarded an unconditional salary to the flagrantly unproductive. And so you would leave a country structured like that. And when people of this sort leave en masse, there is no shopkeeper, truck driver, or rice farmer where the "guaranteed income" can be spent.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  You can skip the "money as a signal" argument and still get that it's not fair. But don't the rice farmer and store keeper get the same thing, plus what they make from their business? That's how I've always imagined this sort of thing.
whiddershins 13y ago
Poor people=people without money. Give poor people money. Then they are less poor. Radical.
auctiontheory 13y ago
This program could change more lives than (gasp!) Facebook. Radical.
mc-lovin 13y ago
Economists have long known that negative income tax (which is equivalent to a guaranteed basic income) is theoretically optimal under the usual assumptions of perfect markets and perfect rationality. However only very few economists, such as Milton Friedman, have advocated it as a practical policy. On the one hand, guaranteed income is much more resistant corruption, since the distribution of money follows a simple rule where there is no discretion on the part of officials, and is similarly resistant to other kinds of rent seeking. On the other hand, through traditional welfare systems, governments may be able to determine who is really in need, and thus save money on giving out welfare to people who could be earning more if they had to. Governments can also give out welfare in kind rather than cash, helping people to make better choices, or make welfare conditional on getting education or training. I very much doubt that a negative income tax could improve over the best administered welfare systems such as Australia's. What is interesting is whether countries with much less ability to administer public services, would be better off with a guaranteed income.
- gruseom 13y ago
  Relying on governments to do the following: * determine who is really in need * helping people to make better choices seems absurd to me, and more a defense of the guaranteed income than a critique of it. Faith in perfect markets is hogwash, but so is this level of faith in bureaucracy; even a wise individual would have trouble making these kinds of judgments personally.
  - mc-lovin 13y ago
    These decisions aren't made at a personal level. E.g. when you provide people with free healthcare instead of giving them money, your are implicitly constraining their choices. Same for food stamps, free public transport for the poor, etc. Determining who is in need means, for example, not giving welfare to people who are not genuinely searching for work. This is a difficult decision to make but it is done fairly well in Australia. It is mostly based on objective criteria e.g. filling in a list of places where you applied for work, showing up to interviews that are arranged for you. I suspect that your objection is not to the general principles listed above, but rather to listing them explicitly without any disclaimers like "I know the government often gets this wrong" etc.
rmckayfleming 13y ago
The Canadian government tried this in Manitoba in the 1970's as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
StavrosK 13y ago
What I took from the article is that there are people living on four dollars a month.
dhughes 13y ago
Maybe it's the culture that makes it work in India although a billion people and so many levels of culture it's hard to say if that even true. Doesn't the UK have a huge problem with generations of families on welfare who never work? I can't see this working in Canada either a lot people on EI (employment insurance) are on it for decades, some all their lives. I know some people who just become accustomed to living on $8,000 per year just enough to get drunk and buy smokes. Although a lot of them have cash under the table jobs too so in a way they do want to or need to work.
- analyst74 13y ago
  I think Canada is an excellent example in support for BI, as the social net is so great that there is no real poverty. However, in spite of the fact that there are ways to live on social security, only a very small number of people choose to do that. It shows that social security does not stop people from having ambitions.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    Well, in Canada, if you can't support yourself, you'll freeze to death on the coming winter.
- JofArnold 13y ago
  > Doesn't the UK have a huge problem with generations of families on welfare who never work? It's a very different concept of welfare to the one Professor Standing and others propose here. The UK brand of welfare requires you to give up your dignity by completing endless forms and checks in the hope that - if your particular brand of requirements fit the definitions laid out by the state - you'll be allowed to live an all-to-often hopeless and impoverished quality of life. Day-to-day you're worrying about food and rent; there's no money for recreation, no money to clothe your children in a respectable way and no money to go on holiday like all your workmates and childrens' friends. You're trapped in your house and there's no opportunity to learn and to retrain in order to make a new life for yourself. Those that do get out of the spiral are those that have super-human resilience and determination over a number of years. The difference a basic income could make to the UK could be enormous. It would change this country over night. It doesn't even matter if a few percent of people abuse it - it is far outweighed by opportunities it will give to those who wish to turn their lives around.
rumcajz 13y ago
It really depends on the existing structure of the society. I guess that in, say, turn-of-century Sicily or present-day Somalia the money would pretty fast end in the hands of local crooks.
aneth4 13y ago
I consider myself pretty economically conservative. After a lot of thought about the future of employment, automation, the effect of wealth distribution, safety nets, and many other factors, I finally concluded that paying all citizens/residents (determining who may be the hardest problem) an equal subsistence wage, enough to cover cheap housing in low demand areas and food, would be of both social and economic benefit to all. Critically, at the same time, drugs should be legalized, regulated, and available to addicts in controlled environments. The threat of starving sick homeless in the street, the basic tenet of laissez faire capitalism, is not a humane incentive for a modern society, nor is it beneficial to a developed economy.
- whiddershins 13y ago
  this is an extremely rational response.
- aneth4 13y ago
  I should add, this is, in fact, a socialist distribution of wealth scheme. That money must come from somewhere if it is not to be inflationary, and it comes from taxes on incomes and properties. The benefit to society and the economy should far outweigh the cost. Those with investments will benefit from the broader base of lower-middle class income to spend money with the companies they are invested with. Those with high income will benefit from a stronger economy supported by the middle class. Those with property will benefit from the reduction in crime, homelessness, poverty, and generally improved social environment. The only downside is the reduced incentive to work. That is real. Many who are now employed may choose not to work, which will increase wages for those who choose to work and reduce involuntary unemployment, which will be on the rise regardless as automation reduces the need for unskilled labor. There is more incentive to work when everyone, employed or unemployed, receives the same minimum income rather than the current situation, where working only earns the differential between unemployment and wages. Unemployment will likely reach 25% in the next 30 years due to increased economic efficiencies, regardless of whether we have a means of supporting the unemployed.
- cookingrobot 13y ago
  I think there's one opportunity you're missing. If you give non-workers enough only for basic needs, then they are basically outside the interesting part of the economic system. They don't make meaningful decisions about where their spending goes. If instead you give them more than that - enough to have disposable income, then all of that spending will trickle up to those who choose to create and work. (all economics besides redistribution are trickle up economics). This means healthy markets and rewards for staying in the workforce. So we get the benefits of capitalism and innovation, instead of just feeding and sheltering most of the population with basics.
kfk 13y ago
BI income should be available to people that really need, because in most countries there are no resources to give it to everybody. Even if there were, I challenge who believes in BI to tell me if the State could not put that money in research, education or just decrease taxes and get a better outcome for its people (and humanity). We have a lot of deadly diseases and a growing need to utilize more and more efficiently our scarce resource (food, energy, etc.), we need research, we need development, we need innovation. I really struggle to see that coming any faster, or at all, in a world were resources are spent to let a big portion of the population stay at home. And please, let's not mix what goes on today, the unemployment rates, with historic economic circles. We are seeing this unemployment since when? 2008? 5 years are not enough to draw drastic conclusion on an economy and its workforce. By the way, 10% unemployment rate says nothing, look at the active population, which usually ranges above 40%, counting kids and pensioners. Which is quite a high number if you ask me, it's not true we don't need workers anymore, you know...
- visarga 13y ago
  As the workforce will be replaced more and more by robots and machine learning / A.I., people will be left jobless. BI will have to be adopted.
  - kfk 13y ago
    They probably said that also in the 19th century and look at us today, have we seen a drastic reduction of the active work population in 2 centuries? No. This kind of thinking assumes that there are people fundamentally flawed that can't support in any way our society. This is just unacceptable. Also, work force is also a scarce resource and as all scarce resources we need to optimize it, not to waste it.
    - dscrd 13y ago
      >They probably said that also in the 19th century and look at us today, have we seen a drastic reduction of the active work population in 2 centuries? No. But we have seen quite a massive increase of public sector. How many actually needed jobs do we have anymore?
corwinstephen 13y ago
I'm in love with this idea, but I'm concerned that it wouldn't work on a grander scale. If everyone in the country had the same basic income, wouldn't the cost of goods and services naturally rise just high enough that the basic income becomes negligible? If I were a land lord, my first thought would be, "Okay, so since everyone is now making $300 rupees/month more, I'm just going to raise the rent by $300 rupees." I feel like it only works in the experiments because the BI group still interacts with the non-BI group.
- deadairspace 13y ago
  But the landlord is also receiving an extra $300. The landlords who increase their prices will lose out to those who keep their prices the same.
downandout 13y ago
I think that this is awesome, but I have to say that none of these people should be having children. To bring a child into extreme poverty not only makes the poverty worse, but is an act of selfish cruelty perpetrated against a child that had no choice in the matter. I would make the basic income conditional: if you need this money, then don't have any more kids. I am not saying you must be rich to have children, but you should at least be able to feed and clothe them.
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- lostlogin 13y ago
  Asking people not to have children is not a good thing to do. Educate them on when/how but don't make a rule. It's a slippery slope to a dark place. Poverty doesn't affect a representative portion of the population. It's going to hit certain races, religions, groups etc harder. As soon as someone cries eugenics/racism, what do you say? You can't claim its being done to help group X if group X disagree. Don't start down the hole and it won't go wrong. That said - I can't imagine having a child in circumstances anywhere near these levels, and I too think this project is awesome.
  - downandout 13y ago
    The choice faced is either allowing unsustainable societies to die off, or subject ever more children to the unspeakable tragedy of being forced to live in those societies. This may sound harsh, but the world simply cannot sustain all of the children that humans choose to produce. The compassionate and humane thing to do is ensure that these people do not pass on their legacy of misery.
- gsnedders 13y ago
  In communities like the one described it's not uncommon for children to be an economic asset — yes, it's a cost for the first few years of their life, but once they are able to help tending animals and fields they can produce sufficient food to sell that they cover their living expenses.
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Millennium 13y ago
One problem with these social experiments is that they never run for long enough. It takes a good 3-4 generations to really see the effect a policy change will have on a society: you need to look at people raised by people who do not remember what came before. Instead, we look at a paltry 5-10 years and consider the matter settled, when the real effects are only just beginning.
JofArnold 13y ago
Here is a video introduction from SEWA and Prof Guy Standing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYtwiG-uAM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYtwiG-uAM
wahsd 13y ago
The intro narrative is a perfect example for why humanity needs a new model on the most fundamental level. It's an issue on par with the atrocity of slavery, one human owning another, their ancestors, and their off-spring; and is actually a holdover from that dark, sadistic, and unrestrained psychotic age of humanity. Inheritance; it needs to die and die fast and hard. The guaranteed success simply through birth is a disgusting human perversion well represented by monarchies and aristocracies of old and new all around the world. A child born to a wealthy person is already going to be so advantaged over those who simply weren't lucky enough to have come out of the right vagina and a product of the right sperm; there is zero justification for their inheritance of anything on top of it. If anything, those who are the offspring of the most wealthy, should be eligible for nothing, while those of the most poor should inherit from their parents tax free. Mark these words; the economy that works out this model and implements it will surge past all others who don't. It would empower and support all that opportunity cost and monopolistic waste that comes from the current system of oppressing the masses at artificial support for the wealthy. I realize most won't be able to comprehend the notion, and will reject it as humans so quickly do when they are faced with something that contradicts their understanding of how the world works; but what I suggest is on the scale of impact like moving from serfdom to capitalism, from slavery to equal freedom. It will be the next positive evolution in human history.
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nazgulnarsil 13y ago
The best take on BI (or NIT) I've seen: auction the unemployed. This solves so many of the problems it's not funny. http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unemployed http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unem...
Dewie 13y ago
If we get to a point in time when most people don't have to work, because of automation and such, and they start instituting a basic income (as opposed to it all going to the elite), then I think that the difference between people when it comes to money is going to become incredibly noticeable. The people that actually dedicate themselves to some kind of structured work - especially the ones that have to invest time into learning the trade, and are held responsible if they screw up, for example doctors - are probably going to be paid much more than the people on basic income. Of course, the people on basic income can do productive things, too, but they aren't held to the same standard as the people that are officially employed - so the people that are in official employment are going to be depending much more than the basic income for having less freedom then all the people on basic income. Then there is going to be an incredible competition for the jobs and the people that miss out is going to suffer socially because they have less affluence to flaunt, and thus less status. There are going to be people that don't care about prestige, of course. The artistic types in particular could have it great.
habosa 13y ago
I like this idea, and I just have one question that maybe someone more knowledgeable can answer for me. If you give everyone an unconditional base income, won't the price of goods and services eventually rise reflect/negate this? I don't see why I wouldn't raise the price for the X I'm selling if I knew that everyone buying it now had a lot more money. Isn't this part of why things in America are so much more expensive than those in India in the first place? The people in the article are buying food for a family on < $0.25 which in America would not even buy a single meal of the same ingredients. It's not that they're eating crappier eggs or rice than we are, but we just have more money to buy these things and manufacturers know that. How do you prevent this in the Basic Income system?
cheez 13y ago
Milton Friedman strikes again (though he advocated a negative income tax)
known 13y ago
I believe implementing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award is the permanent solution

267 points by xSwag 13y ago

The opposite of austerity. I liked this part: Direct cash payments cut out the many leaks and corrupt intermediaries. Delawa said: “The idea of unconditional income comes from the failure of conditional programmes. As soon as there are conditions, there is erosion. Conditionality means intermediaries, which means power, which means corruption.” Corruption is the reason aid programs are so inefficient. By giving money directly to those impacted, the poor are empowered to save and concentrate their unconditional small wealth into larger pools and wield power of a sort.

rubinelli 13y ago
Even when corruption isn't an issue -- and it always is -- there is a lot of waste when some bureaucrat spends someone else's money. But this is their money, and they know exactly how much they would have to work to get it, so they spend on what they need. And this money makes the whole economy flow in their previously cash-starved communities. The effect can be astounding.
- tellarin 13y ago
  Just look at Brazil's income distribution program: Bolsa Familia. It has been shown to improve local economies and people's lives. Even though it is not completely unconditional and doesn't quite get to provide enough for basic needs.
mjn 13y ago
That was the reason even Milton Friedman, otherwise pretty much the opposite of a socialist, though that a basic income was a good option even in western countries. His view was that just giving people unrestricted cash would cut out much of the corruption, inefficiency, and market distortion that creeps in once you start giving intermediaries the power to put conditions and restrictions on support. For example, with food stamps, he was skeptical that the restrictions requiring people to buy "proper" food with them produced better results overall than just giving people the equivalent amount in cash and letting them decide. For one thing, if individual recipients are choosing their food, rather than picking it from a list of food-stamp-approved choices, it completely removes the whole business of lobbying to be on the approved list, plus the bureaucracy of administering the list.
- jasonwocky 13y ago
  The problem is that the economy is often seen as more than a mechanism for efficient allocation and transfer of resources: for many, it's also a source and enforcer of moral order. "People who work hard and play by the rules should have a shot at success. People who don't work shouldn't be given handouts. Corporations who misbehave shouldn't be bailed out, because they're just incented to misbehave again. We should drug test welfare recipients even though it ultimately costs us more than it saves us, because drug addicts shouldn't get welfare." etc etc etc.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    I'm not saying it's true, but in all of those cases it intuitively seems like a bad idea to encourage/not discourage those behaviors. Giving people handouts might give them an incentive not to work, giving corporations handouts lessens the incentive to not fail (and keeps the competitors which did better from gaining a larger market share), refusing drug addicts welfare might encourage them to get help, etc. I'm not saying these things are necessarily true, but it certainly seems reasonable if you don't know otherwise. The point being that it's not because people necessarily see these things as moral issues, but just possible incentive problems.
- cadlin 13y ago
  I couldn't tell if you were implying this, but FYI in the US today food stamps can be used on any food item that isn't prepared (i.e. already cooked).
john_w_t_b 13y ago
Yes, I agree. Get rid of the conditions and pay people directly through bank transfers. The public should push for a basic income in developed countries also. A universal basic income would provide a safety net for entrepreneurs and make it easier for people to pursue education or high risk ventures. It would eliminate vast numbers of bureaucrats and lawyers from programs like US Disability. $1.5 billion was spent on disability lawyers in 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203518404577096632862007046.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020351840457709...) Governments could pay for a universal basic income with pollution taxes. The overall program would be revenue neutral. People would be discouraged from wasting energy (e.g. gasoline) to do low value work.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Basic income and government healthcare would be amazing for freelancers and entrepreneurs. However all our politicians are owned by the corporatists. Effecting change like that seems asymptotic, unreachable.
  - john_w_t_b 13y ago
    Universal income should be popular as every voter would benefit. Alaska has a provident fund with payments to every resident. It might happen in Europe next as a backlash to the austerity programs in place now.
scarmig 13y ago
Austerity is perpendicular to this. You could very easily have a basic income but insist on a strict balanced budget, which would be austerity. You could also very easily have a basic income and a government deficit, which would be anti-austerity.
- batemanesque 13y ago
  thank you for mentioning this. "austrian economics", for all its flaws, has little to do w/ current austerity policies
notahacker 13y ago
Direct payments on this scale don't solve the problem of rentiers that are able to extort the poor. Someone still has the power to directly hand out the cash, and record who has and hasn't received it. Someone still has the ability to dupe villagers into believing the cash payments are contingent upon his goodwill. And somebody still wields enough economic or social power over the villagers to direct most of the returns into his own pocket. The article itself pointed out the real problem with the villagers was that the local landlord owned their land and their debts - a local landlord with the ability to raise everyone's ground rent, increase the work requirements for debt service and appropriate most of the direct cash payment for himself. A compulsory purchase order served on the landlord, and/or some kind of rent control might well be a more effective long term solution to these villagers' long term needs - even though such schemes have obvious potential for bureaucratic abuse.

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EGreg 13y ago

To me, this sort of thing is common sense. All the austrian economics fans talking about better price signals as an argument for less regulation - all of them should consider using the same argument for giving an unconditional safety net to the poor. When a poker player has a small stack at a table, he makes poorer choices. Similarly, poor people cannot optimally use their resources, but must avoid one potential crisis after another. If you free them from the rat race, you can even end minimum wage. What I see in the USA for the past few years is really a class struggle manufactured by ideologues, people vilifying the rich, others vilifying the poor... but with increasing automation and outsourcing, more and more people will find themselves unemployed. If those people had money they'd spend it on basic necessities and the things they want the most. This in turn will empower those industries to produce more things people actually need, and innovate. Who knlows, maybe the poor will even be able to help fund solutions to their own challenges in their communities. Even Milton Friedman advocated for a negative tax.

mjn 13y ago
> All the austrian economics fans talking about better price signals as an argument for less regulation - all of them should consider using the same argument for giving an unconditional safety net to the poor. Interestingly, one of the founders of Austrian economics, F.A. Hayek, actually did argue for a minimum income: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html
- scarmig 13y ago
  Libertarians often are big pushers of a minimum income, actually. It's far more direct and efficient as a means of improving the welfare of the least productive, and it's the least prone to special interests pushing for tax cuts because of how much their good helps kids/the poor/whatever. With a sufficient basic income, you could effectively get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public subsidies in all types of places they're unnecessary or harmful. And you remove the disincentive effect on productivity that most welfare schemes have. Most academic libertarians, in my experience, aren't of the sort that thinks private property rights is the sole criterion and sole justification for everything; their opposition to government activities is based a lot more on how it distorts price signals, public choice issues, and issues of implementation. The basic guaranteed income sidesteps all of those.

sciurus 13y ago

This has been tried in other places with positive results. http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/02/the-basic-income-grant-experiment-in-namibia/ http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/02/the-basic-income-grant-e...

laurentoget 13y ago

Le monde diplomatique is something i really miss about france. Love that someone is asking the real questions.

mynameishere 13y ago
I hear they have a website coming out.

tomjen3 13y ago

If you just start paying people money no matter if they work or not, what is their incentive to improve in life. Frankly, this smells of people trying to sneak communism in through the backdoor. And what do you do when they blow all their money on drugs (this will happen with some of them).

hayksaakian 13y ago
In theory, those who lead destructive lives (drugs) will die sooner (if the anti-drug claims are true) therefore removing themselves from the system. I'd imagine the payments in this case are only enough for food and shelter. Spending $ on drugs makes it harder to obtain the other two. Communism would be conditional income ("to each according to his means, etc."). What the article describes is unconditional.
- mathieuh 13y ago
  Socialism would be conditional income, Full Communism would be unconditional.
enraged_camel 13y ago
So basically, you don't know what communism is.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  To elaborate, communism aims for the abolition of private property and the elimination of class distinctions. BI aims for neither.
funkaster 13y ago
did you even read the article? My impression is that you did not read it, or did not even understood it. Also, you seem to have no idea what communism is about.
sfmcjgkbrbm 13y ago
In communism there is no private property. You can't run business or be employed in any. Minimum income is completely unrelated. It only means giving a few dollars for the poor so they don't starve or freeze to death. It's already done in developed countries (welfare) but in unreliable way. Minimum income doesn't interfere with free market and accumulation of capital.

Aloha 13y ago

I think the concept of the (Guaranteed Annual Income) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income is the most effective way to deliver social services. The overhead is much lower than welfare, WIC or food stamps, meaning it costs less, and more benefit actually makes it to the poor.

jmathai 13y ago

I believe this works when you give women money. My dad does this sort of work in India and we've had many conversations about how you can't trust men with free money.

enraged_camel 13y ago
That is not sexist at all.
- evolve2k 13y ago
  Context on why girls and women: http://www.girleffect.org/why-girls/#&panel1-1 http://www.girleffect.org/why-girls/#&panel1-1
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    There's a difference between making up for an existing disparity (the site you linked claims it is doing this and I applaud them for their efforts) and creating a new one (e.g. differential BI). I don't think there is a single person here who would support giving BI preferentially to men, so when you proposed giving money to women we all assumed you meant giving it preferentially to women, because otherwise your statement would have simply been a restatement of what everyone else was saying. I object to the notion of giving BI preferentially to women, although I fully support the cause of ensuring they receive their share. Please clarify what you meant.
    - jmathai 13y ago
      This isn't about making up for existing disparity or some form of affirmative action ... it's simply that women seem to be the best investment if you want to impact change on future generations.
      - ahk 13y ago
        Please watch this talk (by a woman) on such issues: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=3dwLzB0kFxI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D3dwLzB0kFxI http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=3dwLzB0kFxI&desktop_uri=%... Tl;dw: feminism and sexism has bad effects on society and it is a very big deal.

gmack 13y ago

Another great organization working on this model is http://givedirectly.org http://givedirectly.org, co-founded by the irrepressible Rohit Wanchoo. We had lots of discussion around this model, since his team had done a lot of research around it. It appears to be working well, and recently received a large donation from Google.

nn3 13y ago

"I’m going to save all the money I get and spend it on my son’s wedding.”" ... “But it’s a middle-class prejudice that the poor don’t know how to use money sensibly." I don't want to sound like a "middle class prejudiced person" but spending all the saved money on a wedding doesn't sound very sensible to me.

mathieuh 13y ago
Silly poor people thinking they can both survive and enjoy themselves a little, what nerve!
sfmcjgkbrbm 13y ago
Maybe it's not for one-day wedding ceremony, but for wedding gift that lasts for long time.
deleted 13y ago
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gruseom 13y ago
You cherry-picked that example. (Plus took it out of context—the quote talks first about food and medicine.) But even granting the point completely, the presence of such outcomes in a scatterplot says nothing about whether the approach is beneficial or not on the whole. I find it exciting that this is at least partially amenable to objective experimentation. Why not try it and see? It takes a pretty rigid ideologue to not be open even to that much. (Not talking about you there, but about "they'll only spend it all on drugs" and so on.)
- nn3 13y ago
  I don't think I misquoted. Yes I agree it's an interesting experiment and I like the idea in general. But the article certainly doesn't do a good job arguing for it by quoting that crazy lady and containing such obvious contradictions.
  - deleted 13y ago
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michaelochurch 13y ago

What really gets me going is the realization of how much more value people would produce if they could own their lives outright instead of renting it from one boss to the next. There'd be less "work" of the traditional, low-productivity, subordinate zombie sense, but a lot more getting done. I want to see BI not because I have an interest in not working. Rather, I want it to free people to work. Work is too important (both as a human need, and as a productive force in society) to leave it in the hands of the entrenched boss men who currently own Work. It would be such an excuse-killer, too, to implement BI and get rid of compulsory labor. People could no longer justify making so little of their lives due to having to work. Now, it turns out to still be quite hard to make something of one's life but, when that excuse is gone, the only thing to say is "Yes, it's hard; but go on, do it." Sometimes I wonder, though, if we invented institutional Work to justify mediocrity, and make it OK. It's often portrayed as an oppression brought in by deceptive, aggressive Boss Men; but I also think people willingly participate because it's a way to substitute mediocre/subordinate social acceptance for the much more intermittent reward/thrill of genuine work. Boss men definitely were more principal in driving Work to its current state, but it was a coevolution.

andrewflnr 13y ago
Don't forget that it comes out of the excess of those who do decide to work. I'm not confident that if this was rolled out globally, there would be enough people who really decide to "make something of their lives" to support the system. Sure, a lot of them will hate themselves if they don't, but, honestly now, how often does that stop laziness? Don't look at yourself to answer, look at the culture.
- EGreg 13y ago
  Studies show welfare spending has reduced poverty dramatically and measurably in ALL countries studied. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfares_effect_on_poverty http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfares_effect_on_poverty Other studies show, however, that it has diminishing returns, especially as it leads to poverty/ghetto culture. However this is changing with technology, internet and mobile phones. People are more docile than in the 90s with the gangsta rap craze.

dxbydt 13y ago

We issued $2000 per head debit cards during Katrina ( http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?s=3818003&clienttype=printable http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?s=3818003&clientty... ). These villagers have a Katrina every single day of their lives, so it makes sense.

andrewflnr 13y ago
If it makes sense, that's not why. The reason we started giving people money during Katrina was precisely the change in their circumstances, not their steady-state condition. Suffering, at least the perception of it, is largely relative to previous experiences. Your comment is especially ironic given your username. ;)

temphn 13y ago

The thing about the basic guaranteed income is that it's not usually thought through beyond the first step. Let's extrapolate it out. Say you receive this income. What would you do? Perhaps you would go down to the store and purchase rice. The storekeeper has to work to manage the store, the truck driver drove the rice to market, and the rice farmer had to plant and harvest the rice. A portion of your rupee today goes to the storekeeper. But a portion also diffuses back to the driver and the rice farmer. Those signals are the signals for them to keep doing what they are doing. Yes, it's true that the storekeeper bought the rice in advance of your purchase, but if you look at this as an iterated purchase: in general money flows opposite the flow of goods/services. They accept your money today on the tacit belief that you have provided enough value to someone else, somewhere else that it will even out in the end when it is their turn to consume. However, if the state either takes money (via tax) or centrally creates money (via inflation) to give a "guaranteed basic income", it is essentially forcing the store owner, truck driver, and rice farmer to work for free. The monetary signal becomes broken and no longer signals that the person on the purchasing end has produced something in return for this rice. The shopkeeper, driver, and farmer don't have the vocabulary to articulate this in highfalutin', dispassionate tones. But they can understand that while they are slaving away at work, the person buying their rice is getting something for nothing. And that something is to a nontrivial extent coming directly out of their hide (in the form of taxes or monetary dilution). This is why the passive voice isn't so helpful here - "paying an unconditional basic income" takes away the role of agency. The state is taxing citizens and forcing them to provide services to people who aren't producing anything in return ("unconditional"). Different people have different definitions of justice, but many of those citizens will leave once they understand what is going on. After all, you would leave a company structured like that, which diluted down your equity or awarded an unconditional salary to the flagrantly unproductive. And so you would leave a country structured like that. And when people of this sort leave en masse, there is no shopkeeper, truck driver, or rice farmer where the "guaranteed income" can be spent.

andrewflnr 13y ago
You can skip the "money as a signal" argument and still get that it's not fair. But don't the rice farmer and store keeper get the same thing, plus what they make from their business? That's how I've always imagined this sort of thing.

whiddershins 13y ago

Poor people=people without money. Give poor people money. Then they are less poor. Radical.

auctiontheory 13y ago

This program could change more lives than (gasp!) Facebook. Radical.

mc-lovin 13y ago

Economists have long known that negative income tax (which is equivalent to a guaranteed basic income) is theoretically optimal under the usual assumptions of perfect markets and perfect rationality. However only very few economists, such as Milton Friedman, have advocated it as a practical policy. On the one hand, guaranteed income is much more resistant corruption, since the distribution of money follows a simple rule where there is no discretion on the part of officials, and is similarly resistant to other kinds of rent seeking. On the other hand, through traditional welfare systems, governments may be able to determine who is really in need, and thus save money on giving out welfare to people who could be earning more if they had to. Governments can also give out welfare in kind rather than cash, helping people to make better choices, or make welfare conditional on getting education or training. I very much doubt that a negative income tax could improve over the best administered welfare systems such as Australia's. What is interesting is whether countries with much less ability to administer public services, would be better off with a guaranteed income.

gruseom 13y ago
Relying on governments to do the following: * determine who is really in need * helping people to make better choices seems absurd to me, and more a defense of the guaranteed income than a critique of it. Faith in perfect markets is hogwash, but so is this level of faith in bureaucracy; even a wise individual would have trouble making these kinds of judgments personally.
- mc-lovin 13y ago
  These decisions aren't made at a personal level. E.g. when you provide people with free healthcare instead of giving them money, your are implicitly constraining their choices. Same for food stamps, free public transport for the poor, etc. Determining who is in need means, for example, not giving welfare to people who are not genuinely searching for work. This is a difficult decision to make but it is done fairly well in Australia. It is mostly based on objective criteria e.g. filling in a list of places where you applied for work, showing up to interviews that are arranged for you. I suspect that your objection is not to the general principles listed above, but rather to listing them explicitly without any disclaimers like "I know the government often gets this wrong" etc.

rmckayfleming 13y ago

The Canadian government tried this in Manitoba in the 1970's as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

StavrosK 13y ago

What I took from the article is that there are people living on four dollars a month.

dhughes 13y ago

Maybe it's the culture that makes it work in India although a billion people and so many levels of culture it's hard to say if that even true. Doesn't the UK have a huge problem with generations of families on welfare who never work? I can't see this working in Canada either a lot people on EI (employment insurance) are on it for decades, some all their lives. I know some people who just become accustomed to living on $8,000 per year just enough to get drunk and buy smokes. Although a lot of them have cash under the table jobs too so in a way they do want to or need to work.

analyst74 13y ago
I think Canada is an excellent example in support for BI, as the social net is so great that there is no real poverty. However, in spite of the fact that there are ways to live on social security, only a very small number of people choose to do that. It shows that social security does not stop people from having ambitions.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Well, in Canada, if you can't support yourself, you'll freeze to death on the coming winter.
JofArnold 13y ago
> Doesn't the UK have a huge problem with generations of families on welfare who never work? It's a very different concept of welfare to the one Professor Standing and others propose here. The UK brand of welfare requires you to give up your dignity by completing endless forms and checks in the hope that - if your particular brand of requirements fit the definitions laid out by the state - you'll be allowed to live an all-to-often hopeless and impoverished quality of life. Day-to-day you're worrying about food and rent; there's no money for recreation, no money to clothe your children in a respectable way and no money to go on holiday like all your workmates and childrens' friends. You're trapped in your house and there's no opportunity to learn and to retrain in order to make a new life for yourself. Those that do get out of the spiral are those that have super-human resilience and determination over a number of years. The difference a basic income could make to the UK could be enormous. It would change this country over night. It doesn't even matter if a few percent of people abuse it - it is far outweighed by opportunities it will give to those who wish to turn their lives around.

rumcajz 13y ago

It really depends on the existing structure of the society. I guess that in, say, turn-of-century Sicily or present-day Somalia the money would pretty fast end in the hands of local crooks.

aneth4 13y ago

I consider myself pretty economically conservative. After a lot of thought about the future of employment, automation, the effect of wealth distribution, safety nets, and many other factors, I finally concluded that paying all citizens/residents (determining who may be the hardest problem) an equal subsistence wage, enough to cover cheap housing in low demand areas and food, would be of both social and economic benefit to all. Critically, at the same time, drugs should be legalized, regulated, and available to addicts in controlled environments. The threat of starving sick homeless in the street, the basic tenet of laissez faire capitalism, is not a humane incentive for a modern society, nor is it beneficial to a developed economy.

whiddershins 13y ago
this is an extremely rational response.
aneth4 13y ago
I should add, this is, in fact, a socialist distribution of wealth scheme. That money must come from somewhere if it is not to be inflationary, and it comes from taxes on incomes and properties. The benefit to society and the economy should far outweigh the cost. Those with investments will benefit from the broader base of lower-middle class income to spend money with the companies they are invested with. Those with high income will benefit from a stronger economy supported by the middle class. Those with property will benefit from the reduction in crime, homelessness, poverty, and generally improved social environment. The only downside is the reduced incentive to work. That is real. Many who are now employed may choose not to work, which will increase wages for those who choose to work and reduce involuntary unemployment, which will be on the rise regardless as automation reduces the need for unskilled labor. There is more incentive to work when everyone, employed or unemployed, receives the same minimum income rather than the current situation, where working only earns the differential between unemployment and wages. Unemployment will likely reach 25% in the next 30 years due to increased economic efficiencies, regardless of whether we have a means of supporting the unemployed.
cookingrobot 13y ago
I think there's one opportunity you're missing. If you give non-workers enough only for basic needs, then they are basically outside the interesting part of the economic system. They don't make meaningful decisions about where their spending goes. If instead you give them more than that - enough to have disposable income, then all of that spending will trickle up to those who choose to create and work. (all economics besides redistribution are trickle up economics). This means healthy markets and rewards for staying in the workforce. So we get the benefits of capitalism and innovation, instead of just feeding and sheltering most of the population with basics.

kfk 13y ago

BI income should be available to people that really need, because in most countries there are no resources to give it to everybody. Even if there were, I challenge who believes in BI to tell me if the State could not put that money in research, education or just decrease taxes and get a better outcome for its people (and humanity). We have a lot of deadly diseases and a growing need to utilize more and more efficiently our scarce resource (food, energy, etc.), we need research, we need development, we need innovation. I really struggle to see that coming any faster, or at all, in a world were resources are spent to let a big portion of the population stay at home. And please, let's not mix what goes on today, the unemployment rates, with historic economic circles. We are seeing this unemployment since when? 2008? 5 years are not enough to draw drastic conclusion on an economy and its workforce. By the way, 10% unemployment rate says nothing, look at the active population, which usually ranges above 40%, counting kids and pensioners. Which is quite a high number if you ask me, it's not true we don't need workers anymore, you know...

visarga 13y ago
As the workforce will be replaced more and more by robots and machine learning / A.I., people will be left jobless. BI will have to be adopted.
- kfk 13y ago
  They probably said that also in the 19th century and look at us today, have we seen a drastic reduction of the active work population in 2 centuries? No. This kind of thinking assumes that there are people fundamentally flawed that can't support in any way our society. This is just unacceptable. Also, work force is also a scarce resource and as all scarce resources we need to optimize it, not to waste it.
  - dscrd 13y ago
    >They probably said that also in the 19th century and look at us today, have we seen a drastic reduction of the active work population in 2 centuries? No. But we have seen quite a massive increase of public sector. How many actually needed jobs do we have anymore?

corwinstephen 13y ago

I'm in love with this idea, but I'm concerned that it wouldn't work on a grander scale. If everyone in the country had the same basic income, wouldn't the cost of goods and services naturally rise just high enough that the basic income becomes negligible? If I were a land lord, my first thought would be, "Okay, so since everyone is now making $300 rupees/month more, I'm just going to raise the rent by $300 rupees." I feel like it only works in the experiments because the BI group still interacts with the non-BI group.

deadairspace 13y ago
But the landlord is also receiving an extra $300. The landlords who increase their prices will lose out to those who keep their prices the same.

downandout 13y ago

I think that this is awesome, but I have to say that none of these people should be having children. To bring a child into extreme poverty not only makes the poverty worse, but is an act of selfish cruelty perpetrated against a child that had no choice in the matter. I would make the basic income conditional: if you need this money, then don't have any more kids. I am not saying you must be rich to have children, but you should at least be able to feed and clothe them.

deleted 13y ago
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lostlogin 13y ago
Asking people not to have children is not a good thing to do. Educate them on when/how but don't make a rule. It's a slippery slope to a dark place. Poverty doesn't affect a representative portion of the population. It's going to hit certain races, religions, groups etc harder. As soon as someone cries eugenics/racism, what do you say? You can't claim its being done to help group X if group X disagree. Don't start down the hole and it won't go wrong. That said - I can't imagine having a child in circumstances anywhere near these levels, and I too think this project is awesome.
- downandout 13y ago
  The choice faced is either allowing unsustainable societies to die off, or subject ever more children to the unspeakable tragedy of being forced to live in those societies. This may sound harsh, but the world simply cannot sustain all of the children that humans choose to produce. The compassionate and humane thing to do is ensure that these people do not pass on their legacy of misery.
gsnedders 13y ago
In communities like the one described it's not uncommon for children to be an economic asset — yes, it's a cost for the first few years of their life, but once they are able to help tending animals and fields they can produce sufficient food to sell that they cover their living expenses.

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Millennium 13y ago

One problem with these social experiments is that they never run for long enough. It takes a good 3-4 generations to really see the effect a policy change will have on a society: you need to look at people raised by people who do not remember what came before. Instead, we look at a paltry 5-10 years and consider the matter settled, when the real effects are only just beginning.

JofArnold 13y ago

Here is a video introduction from SEWA and Prof Guy Standing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYtwiG-uAM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYtwiG-uAM

wahsd 13y ago

The intro narrative is a perfect example for why humanity needs a new model on the most fundamental level. It's an issue on par with the atrocity of slavery, one human owning another, their ancestors, and their off-spring; and is actually a holdover from that dark, sadistic, and unrestrained psychotic age of humanity. Inheritance; it needs to die and die fast and hard. The guaranteed success simply through birth is a disgusting human perversion well represented by monarchies and aristocracies of old and new all around the world. A child born to a wealthy person is already going to be so advantaged over those who simply weren't lucky enough to have come out of the right vagina and a product of the right sperm; there is zero justification for their inheritance of anything on top of it. If anything, those who are the offspring of the most wealthy, should be eligible for nothing, while those of the most poor should inherit from their parents tax free. Mark these words; the economy that works out this model and implements it will surge past all others who don't. It would empower and support all that opportunity cost and monopolistic waste that comes from the current system of oppressing the masses at artificial support for the wealthy. I realize most won't be able to comprehend the notion, and will reject it as humans so quickly do when they are faced with something that contradicts their understanding of how the world works; but what I suggest is on the scale of impact like moving from serfdom to capitalism, from slavery to equal freedom. It will be the next positive evolution in human history.

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nazgulnarsil 13y ago

The best take on BI (or NIT) I've seen: auction the unemployed. This solves so many of the problems it's not funny. http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unemployed http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unem...

Dewie 13y ago

If we get to a point in time when most people don't have to work, because of automation and such, and they start instituting a basic income (as opposed to it all going to the elite), then I think that the difference between people when it comes to money is going to become incredibly noticeable. The people that actually dedicate themselves to some kind of structured work - especially the ones that have to invest time into learning the trade, and are held responsible if they screw up, for example doctors - are probably going to be paid much more than the people on basic income. Of course, the people on basic income can do productive things, too, but they aren't held to the same standard as the people that are officially employed - so the people that are in official employment are going to be depending much more than the basic income for having less freedom then all the people on basic income. Then there is going to be an incredible competition for the jobs and the people that miss out is going to suffer socially because they have less affluence to flaunt, and thus less status. There are going to be people that don't care about prestige, of course. The artistic types in particular could have it great.

habosa 13y ago

I like this idea, and I just have one question that maybe someone more knowledgeable can answer for me. If you give everyone an unconditional base income, won't the price of goods and services eventually rise reflect/negate this? I don't see why I wouldn't raise the price for the X I'm selling if I knew that everyone buying it now had a lot more money. Isn't this part of why things in America are so much more expensive than those in India in the first place? The people in the article are buying food for a family on < $0.25 which in America would not even buy a single meal of the same ingredients. It's not that they're eating crappier eggs or rice than we are, but we just have more money to buy these things and manufacturers know that. How do you prevent this in the Basic Income system?

cheez 13y ago

Milton Friedman strikes again (though he advocated a negative income tax)

known 13y ago

I believe implementing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award is the permanent solution