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Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

• joshuaellinger 13y ago
  It misses the fact that work is fulfilling for (most) people. I've heard talk of the government being the employer of last resort, which has its own problems. But just paying people to breath has problems as well.
  • nkoren 13y ago
    I think you're missing the fact that wage labour isn't the only legitimate kind of work. Volunteering is also fulfilling for people. So is parenting and caretaking. So are any number of other activities which are hard work, very rewarding, beneficial to society -- and yet are uncompensated by a wage labour system. Under a UBI, those become more viable activities, so that wage labour no longer becomes the ONLY monetarily viable way of finding fulfilling work.
    • joshuaellinger 13y ago
      No argument there. I love the idea of creating a pool of money that goes to people who do work that is beneficial to society. Or even just to make art for personal enjoyment. I'd just like to avoid having the government pay people to, say, drink and party. I think there does need to be some external social pressure / structure to motivate people. Otherwise, you wind up with the same political problems what current welfare programs have. The best solution I can think of is that the government hires and trains people to do some form of public service if they can't find anything else they would rather do. Limit it to 20 hours per week. If people are really useless, give them a disability wavier. If not, have them plant free or clean up parks. I've seen the impact of people living on the dole in Britain. It's not good for them or the society. It just abandoning them to lead a mediocre life.
      • nkoren 13y ago
        Living on the dole is indeed terrible for people -- but it's terrible because it's a poverty trap. A poverty trap isn't created by supporting people who don't earn a wage: it's created by withdrawing support for people who do earn a wage (or engage in other forms of value-creation which the dole administrators disapprove of). Because a person on the dole is micro-managed in their activities, they are unable to volunteer or work part-time without risking losing their one reliable source of income. This is exactly what traps them in a life of unrewarding idleness. Your proposal would create a poverty trap in exactly the same way as the dole (in fact this is how the dole currently works in Britain -- you've just described something quite akin to the Workfare program, aka slavery for the wageless). Unconditional basic income is not like this at all. It isn't paying people to be idle: it's paying people no matter how much they earn. Because you can never lose your basic income, you are never disincentivised from working. Thus people can volunteer, raise children, care for elderly parents -- or work part-time, or full-time, or in whatever situation they prefer -- without ever losing their safety net. This allows for nire diverse forms of value-creation to be created than in the kind of micro-managed nanny-state that you describe.
        • joshuaellinger 13y ago
          I don't like my proposal that much either. It has the flaws you mention, particularly if implemented by our current political class. I was being intentionally vague on the implementation and you assumed that current political forces turn it into a poverty trap. But current political forces also prevent an unconditional basic income. It really comes down to how much you trust people to find their own path. That clearly depends on how old they are. Below 18, you are required to be in school and you are not allowed to work. After 65, you get to live off our national pension plan and get free health care. The other thing that makes me cautious about the unconditional income approach is the handful of rich kids that I knew in High School in Austin, TX. They had everything they could possible want handed to them and were miserable. It was puzzling as hell. FDR had a really big internal debate over this during the Great Depression. Read a little of the history of that era -- it is not an easy tradeoff.
          • 13y ago
  • alex-g 13y ago
    Basic income makes it easier to work, because one no longer has to choose between working and receiving benefits. There's currently a huge divide between working zero hours for unemployment benefit, and having to work many hours to get the equivalent in wages. With basic income there's no bureaucratic friction with signing on and off, or having to justify your need for support. Any extra hours worked give you extra money, and they'll be hours "on the books" - no need to hide the fact that you're working - which is a win all round.
  • nawitus 13y ago
    >It misses the fact that work is fulfilling for (most) people. Basic income is not against working, it's point is to let people work in all kinds of situations. Old-fashion social security usually makes the tax rate for certain part-time / freelancing work 100% (e.g. $100 increase in pay can reduce benefits $100, therefore the actual marginal tax rate is 100% and most people won't do that work). > But just paying people to breath has problems as well. You can do that in most Nordic countries, and it has many more benefits than disadvantages. For example, you can walk safely everywhere because everyone has sufficient social security. Street robberies and whatnot are practically non-existent.
    • waps 13y ago
      1) Work is not nearly as fulfilling as doing nothing for most people. I have no trouble admitting this to myself. And while I'd probably still do something, I'd no longer see any need to make any compromises to work together with anybody else. That would be satisfying. It would also be an economically negative proposition, but I'd learn a lot. Or at least, I'd feel I do. 2) About the "Nordic countries". WTF ? Have you looked at the crime stats for Malmo ? Please note that the nordic countries are in a somewhat special situation just because of their location. They also have very few homeless. Of course, homelessness is a death penalty there, merely because of the weather. That means that in Nordic countries everybody has a house, and not made from wood, double glazing, brick, generally solid and everybody's inside before the sun is down. Breaking and entering after dark is insane.
      • nawitus 13y ago
        >2) About the "Nordic countries". WTF ? Have you looked at the crime stats for Malmo ? Yeah, well immigration can create major problems with crime. >They also have very few homeless. Of course, homelessness is a death penalty there, merely because of the weather. That means that in Nordic countries everybody has a house, and not made from wood, double glazing, brick, generally solid and everybody's inside before the sun is down. Breaking and entering after dark is insane. Yeah, because we have a good social security and everyone can get an apartment.
  • king_jester 13y ago
    > It misses the fact that work is fulfilling for (most) people. There are all kinds of work that people undertake today that are not paid for or economically rewarded. Providing a basic income allows those people to continue to do that work or explore new kinds of work that aren't paid for at this time.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > It misses the fact that work is fulfilling for (most) people. No, it doesn't, instead, it leverages it. Basic income increases labor mobility and increases the ability of people to find the most fulfilling work (which may not be the most financially rewarding, especially in short term analysis.)
• norswap 13y ago
  Won't the basic income drive prices up to the point where you need to work anyway?
  • babby 13y ago
    Not necessarily. People will only, for example, buy luxury items that are affordable - laptops, nice clothes etc. So, if most of the population which are sustained mostly on this form of base income cant afford said items, corporations theoretically wont be able to offload their products, products for which if you consider automation trends, the cost of producing should go down even further. No idea if this is sustainable.
  • nawitus 13y ago
    No(t necessarily). Basic income can be cost neutral. One such cost neutral model was proposed in Finland, so there's no inflation.
• btilly 13y ago
  I've got a twist on this basic idea. Fund basic income with a large tax on various CO2 producing activities. With the idea that - on average - people can pay this tax out of the basic income received from it. And people will have direct incentives to find ways to reduce CO2 consumption. Then get rid of silly specific legislation that tries to achieve the same goal in less successful ways. Thus fuel efficiency, California's attempts at cap-and-trade, incentives for renewable energy - all should become unnecessary.
  • enko 13y ago
    See Australian politics for clues on why that probably won't be an attractive option for politicians where you are. We implemented a carbon tax. While not perfect, it's a pretty decent stab IMO, yet is very easy to demonise and as such is wildly unpopular with hoi polloi. It's a real pity that many good legislative ideas seem to be susceptible to simplistic populist attack if you yell loud enough.
    • Cowen 13y ago
      > It's a real pity that many good legislative ideas seem to be susceptible to simplistic populist attack if you yell loud enough. I'm having trouble finding it now (so please take it with a grain of salt), but I remember once reading a quote by a southern US politician in the 1950s that went something like: "I used to talk about paving roads and better schools and no one listened. Then I started pounding tables about [black people] and suddenly everyone supported me." Similarly, Joe McCarthy (of McCarthyism fame) was a pretty unremarkable Senator for his first three years in office. Then one day, he claimed he had a list of known Communists working in the State department, and the next day he was a household name. Populism has always been a really easy way for politicians to drum up fervent support. A shame that it rarely ever solves any problems.
      • enko 13y ago
        I've been struggling with this concept for a while. How can we have an effective democracy when it's so easy for stupid, essentially malicious, but persuasive-sounding "political memes" to infect the working classes and derail processes which are actually in the country's interest? I still don't know the answer but realising that the media were actually part of the effective bureaucracy was a revelation. We've been lucky, for a long time, that the media has basically done the right thing for the good of the country. Collectively, they are in charge. They slip up every now and again, giving air time to toxic memes like the carbon tax thing, and of course the example you raised - McCarthy suddenly got traction because he comes bearing gifts of news. But generally it's been not too bad. I hope we remain lucky.
• speeder 13y ago
  And where the money to pay for that will come from? I suspect if you just tax the rich like crazy, they will just move out to somewhere else.
  • mtoddh 13y ago
    And where the money to pay for that will come from? Apparently corporations will be subsidizing this: "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes. As I mentioned above, corporate profit margins have hit an all time high, and that money will circulate far faster if it’s placed in the hands of consumers."
    • jeffasinger 13y ago
      I think reducing the bureaucracy around the current welfare system would also help a lot.
  • nawitus 13y ago
    You tax everyone more and give everyone more money. The average person will receive x euros more every month and pay taxes x euros more every month in income tax. The richer than average will probably slightly lose net income and the poorer than average will probably slightly increase net income. There are various income models, and that's just one example.
  • streptomycin 13y ago
    I suspect that the rich would rather pay higher taxes than face civil unrest from the ever-increasing fraction of the population that can't find work.
    • cpursley 13y ago
      Money and business moves to where it's most welcome for the same reason people move to neighborhoods with low rates of theft (after all, taxation and inflationary monetary policy is theft no matter which way it's painted). The reason people can't find work now is due to the failures of central planning, not the lack of it. Communist and hard-socialist countries all have tried the basic income idea and failed. The only exceptions are where the basic income is funded through resources, not confiscation of wealth - and even this takes wise, benevolent leadership. When you confiscate wealth to provide a basic income, you create a disincentive to create wealth and an incentive to not work in exchange for basic income. This creates a rapid increase in both, which backfires because you have more people to support with basic income and less revenue because business owners scale back. It all sounds good in theory, but in practice... Edit: Interesting on the downvotes without the explanations. Do any of you live in the real world?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• cpursley 13y ago
  Please keep the do-gooder central planning away from my bank account. Thanks.
  • toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Says the founder who has a business based off of a major component of US central planning (housing).
    • cpursley 13y ago
      What? The two are mutually exclusive. I know it's hard to fathom, but people purchased real estate, and will continue to do so with, or without, central planning. Central planning (expanding the monetary supply and forcing banks to lend) has little effect on my business.
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        Did you mean "orthogonal" in place of "mutually exclusive"? If they were in fact mutually exclusive then any central planning should have a dramatic (and negative) effect on your business.
    • bobo13579 13y ago
      This is the most ridiculous thing I've read on HN. Also, the personal attack was real classy.
  • sanderjd 13y ago
    I also hate this idea, but I agree that the long term trend is for society to support very few jobs. Do you disagree that this is the trend? If not, do you have any better ideas for what to do about it?
  • ihateloggingin 13y ago
    This is the opposite of central planning. It lets everyone decide what to do with the money themselves.
• brador 13y ago
  With basic income, wouldn't the economy adapt to the fresh money supply and rents and other costs raise to account for it? It would effectivly be additional currency inflation by a different name?
  • alexvr 13y ago
    Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc.
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      That'd be a whole lot more expensive, not meet people's individual needs as well, and have more opportunity for corruption and abuse.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc. The problem that BI advocates see with that is that there is much greater overhead in managing a default shelter program, food plan, non-food-non-shelter-necessities-of-life-plan, etc., than just establishing and managing a single universal cash allowance plan.
      • tomjen3 13y ago
        It has a higher overhead now, but how many people would actually use it, versus BI? Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food.
        • dragonwriter 13y ago
          > It has a higher overhead now, but how many people would actually use it, versus BI? It has a higher overhead even with a much smaller number of people using it, because the overhead is involved in enforcing the conditions which don't exist for unconditional basic income. (That is, the overhead in existing social welfare programs is largely costs expended to prevent people from using them, either at all or in the incorrect amounts for their particular qualifications. A fixed universal unconditional entitlement doesn't have that overhead because it doesn't have that function.) > Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food. People can recieve and derive utility from virtually unlimited amounts of food (just like money), even if they can only eat a limited amount, as food is a commodity. And as much as the point you make about the politics of raising BI is frequently made about any social benefit, I don't think there's much reason to believe its true of BI. There are quite a lot of people who are already aware that benefits have costs (both personal and social), and the people who have the most interest in focussing on the personal cost also have the most resources to bring the social costs to the public eye. That being said, there's no reason BI levels couldn't be managed by a politically insulated group (something like the Federal Reserve), and plenty of reasons why a legislature might prefer to leave those kinds of decisions to such a body.
• blackaspen 13y ago
  For all of these "Trends" that seem to "push us towards an unconditional basic income" I'm sure there are stronger "Real Quantified Trends" that push us in the opposite direction.
• steveplace 13y ago
  Basic income on top of everything else doesn't make much sense (cost-wise). But if we could trade B.I. for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and other social progams-- it would probably be more cost efficient as individuals look after their money better than other people do. Here's a video from Milton Friedman (not Tom Friedman!) who is advocating for a negative income tax-- a variation of basic income. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
  • steveklabnik 13y ago
    The article directly addresses this point: > The welfare bureaucracy is largely dismantled. No means testing, no signing on, no bullying young people into stacking shelves for free, no separate state pension.
  • effn 13y ago
    You can't use Social Security funds to fund a Basic Income. It operates similarly to a pension fund so it would be equivalent to confiscate peoples lifetime savings. Good luck explaining that to someone who is just about to retire.
    • derefr 13y ago
      You can, however, say that going forward, people will pay into basic income instead of social security; and that no one born after [policy-change date] will receive social security in the future (since they never paid into it.)
      • effn 13y ago
        Possible in theory. But then you have to explain to people why they are paying the same amount of tax as people one year older than them, but will still receive a lot less when they retire.
        • dllthomas 13y ago
          It needn't be a sharp cutoff.
• blacktulip 13y ago
  So Communism wins？
  • summerdown2 13y ago
    Or capitalism? One argument for the basic income is it allows everyone to be an entrepreneur by removing the benefits trap.
  • toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I think Lazy Communism is a better term for it, because you're not told what to buy but are given an allowance to do so.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• pieterhg 13y ago
  Can somebody explain to me how basic income can work in terms of the cycle of spending? If companies have to pay for all of people's income through a taxable percentage of their income, then these companies will only receive a share of that amount back through consumer spending? So the economy will shrink in a vicious cycle, right?
  • maxerickson 13y ago
    I think it is hard to be confident about what would happen. If most people elected to stop working the economy would probably contract. If instead the impact were to give more people the option of making longer term choices, you might see the economy expand. If the basic income is set at a basic enough level, work should remain an attractive option.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    Money doesn't disappear.
• khill 13y ago
  Wouldn't the basic income value need to vary across regions? For example, the notion that: "Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on" would mean a different value in San Francisco than in Grover, NC. If the government adjusted the basic income to account for regional cost-of-living, I imagine it would be popular to maintain a fake residency in an expensive area while actually living somewhere cheaper. If the basic income wasn't adjusted for different areas, you would probably see some areas become rich elite enclaves while other areas become basic income ghettos.
  • BWStearns 13y ago
    >> If the government adjusted the basic income to account for regional cost-of-living, I imagine it would be popular to maintain a fake residency in an expensive area while actually living somewhere cheaper. Good hack. >> some areas become rich elite enclaves while other areas become basic income ghettos. This is basically the direction we're already headed in already.
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      >>> some areas become rich elite enclaves while other areas become basic income ghettos. > This is basically the direction we're already headed in already. A flat basic income would make this better not worse, as there would be more money available serving the needs of people in these poorer areas.
      • BWStearns 13y ago
        I am inclined to agree with you but I'm not certain. There are some arguments that those living off of BI would form a unique subset of the population and might effectively be ghettoized at least in terms of colocation as opposed to the more economic/social aspect due to their similar needs/means.
        • jchrisa 13y ago
          the whole point of BI is that everyone gets it, even the rich
• trg2 13y ago
  This was really an incredible writeup, and I personally can agree with many of the long term trends. Loved the Dan Pink citation as well.
• ezxs 13y ago
  Russians tried it with USSR. Every time new technology is introduced everyone gets scared that jobs go away. Over time the level of service and innovation requirements go up providing more jobs for those that adapt. Such as life. Don't make the world what its not. It most likely won't work. :-)
  • steveklabnik 13y ago
    Can you tell me more about basic income in the USSR? The wikipedia page on basic income doesn't mention it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee#Examples_of_implementation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee#Examples...
    • ezxs 13y ago
      Basically the government guaranteed to get you a job with a basic income. All seemed like a good idea "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" until folks realized that the people deciding basically were the ruling class and the working class now worked out of fear of Gulag instead of financial rewards.
      • steveklabnik 13y ago
        That is _not_ what Basic Income is. That's full employment. Totally different.
  • old-gregg 13y ago
    Russians tried the exact opposite: everyone was required to work in the USSR. You'll get a minor prison sentence for avoiding work (IIRC it was called "went to jail for idleness"). The law was hard to enforce though. What the blog post describes is, basically, communism. The official communist party line in USSR (correctly) identified the lack of automation (advanced technology) to make it a reality. Basically the official state goal of the Soviet Union was to advance the science and technology towards achieving that goal, hence the repressions against religion, endless attempts to identify and focus "more important" sciences and skip "less important" ones, introduction of pyatiletkas (5 year plans), etc.
• mikekij 13y ago
  Do you have any idea how many people would just not work, sit at home, watch TV, and collect their BI check?
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    If the BI is high, quite a number. The question is whether there's (1) something they can do that's more valuable than watching TV and (2) some reasonable way we can motivate them to do so. If (1) and if a lower BI is an effective way of motivating that behavior, then that's a good argument for a lower BI. It doesn't follow that the optimal level is zero. I don't expect the number that would stay home and collect their $1 of basic income would be substantially greater than the number that currently stay home and collect their $0.
  • maxerickson 13y ago
    Given 300 million people, it's prudent to consider the net impact and not sweat the details too much. Say a policy makes 200 million people better off in some virtuous manner but creates 10 million free loaders. Is that a horrible policy? Say the value of the virtuous benefit is 10x the cost of the free loading?
    • ihateloggingin 13y ago
      The other poster's concern is obviously punishing the undeserving poor. However, the point of the article here is to assume that millions will be "free loaders" no matter what we do because their labor is unnecessary.
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        > [M]illions will be "free loaders" no matter what we do because their labor is unnecessary. Not if we kill them.
  • vixen99 13y ago
    For what it's worth Britain has around four million adults living on benefits (else they'd starve) who have never had a full- time job in their lives. No idea what they do with their time but aside from the odd part-time job, they depend on someone else working on their behalf. That is a truism not a criticism. Sounds like a pretty good experimental group for testing the suggestion mooted here.
• grecy 13y ago
  Australia already has essentially this setup. Every person in the country can be paid $492.60 every two weeks ($12,800 yearly) and up to another $121 every two weeks ($3,146 yearly) to help with rent. Everyone qualifies, forever, irrelevant of past job history, education, family status, etc. etc. There is no time limit for the payments. The only difference between this and the article, is that if you get a job, whatever you earn is deducted from your payments. I personally think it does a fantastic job of making sure there is no poverty in the country, and it means Australia has an enormous middle class. (Link updated) [1] http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/01/16/dole-around-the-world-how-does-australia-stack-up/ http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/01/16/dole-around-the-world-ho...
  • sologoub 13y ago
    Link appears to be broken: http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/01/16/dole-around-the-world-how-does-australia-stack-up/ http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/01/16/dole-around-the-world-ho... The interesting part in the article is that in order to receive this payment, you have to be actively looking for work. Not sure how this is measured, but the qualification makes it philosophically different from the unconditional wage being advocated.
    • grecy 13y ago
      Thanks for the link update. You are right, you must apply for x jobs per month, and keep a logbook of that activity. In that sense, yes, it's philosophically different from the unconditional wage, but it's a good example of the effect on society (no extreme poverty, huge middle class, higher taxes, etc.)
  • marcofloriano 13y ago
    I´m not sure if Australia is a good example. From Wikipedia: "The Report, Poverty In Australia, shows that in 2010, after taking account of housing costs, an estimated 2,265,000 people or 12.8% of all people, including 575,000 children (17.3% of all children), lived in households below the most austere poverty line widely used in international research." [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Australia
• axuaq 13y ago
  Can we come up with a solution that doesn't strong-arm workers into keeping society's dead weight around? Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV at the cost of the freedom of everyone to make and spend money as they please?
  • diydsp 13y ago
    thank you for this. I'm an empathetic person, but every morning I drive out of my driveway to work and look at the house across the street from me with three people who stay home all day in their house watching TV. When I get home, their TV is still on and the other people in my building and I are exhausted from working and finally get some time for recreation, usually in the dark. The other neighbors say the across-the-street people are selling opiates. They should be made to do something in return for their government money: anything useful around town like cleaning up, repainting signs, babysitting- not just getting free government money to capitalize their opiate sales. I love my job, but not enough that I would come here everyday first thing in the morning if I weren't being paid. That's why the Wikipedia example mentioned in the article is a _terrible_ counterexample for OP's point. First, Wikipedia is a _clone_, not an original work. Second, it's billions of micro-contributions, not people working 40-45 hours per week like the others in my building and myself. No one is that motivated. As posted yesterday, the theory of the Tyranny of Structurelessness is real. Only a small portion of society functions without leaders. And I admit that I am not one of its leaders (yet!), but I am comfortable for the most getting led toward productive efforts. That's why I believe poverty is a failure of leadership. It's the inability or disinclination of leaders to herd those people into something useful. It's cheaper to pay them to stay home. It's got nothing to do with them being lazy, as someone else wrote. MOST of us are lazy, not merely the unemployed.
    • cadlin 13y ago
      Have you considered the fact that you don't know anything about the lives of the people who live across the street from you and maybe you should refrain from judging them so harshly?
    • ihateloggingin 13y ago
• cdoxsey 13y ago
  I think in the end this wouldn't work. It'd play out something like this: A certain percentage of the population would stop working entirely since they no longer need to. (Particularly when politicians push the basic income amount up to placate constituencies) Because workers bow out of the system certain industries lose productive capacity. Maybe we stop producing enough food, or enough fuel. Prices rise (assuming a moderately free market), which causes the basic income amount to rise and it spirals out of control from there. The state is forced to intervene. Either by forcing people to work certain jobs (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_(1968)#August_1981_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...) or by capping the basic income and reincentivizing work. Hayek: The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.
  • milesskorpen 13y ago
    Alternative scenario: A certain % stop working for existing businesses. However, since there is greater money velocity in the system (vs. investments), there's still high demand (likely _higher_ demand). Businesses which had been slow to automate their production do so, spending more money on high-skill positions. Prices temporarily increase to pay for this capital investment, but within a few years drop to below prices pre-BI. Note that the author DOESN'T advocate necessarily doing this today, but that this is somewhat inevitable. I think I agree — eventually, the vast majority of jobs in our society will be automated / done by machines. Either we give these people a BI, or a very large segment of our population falls into poverty, which has other damaging political ramifications (revolution?).
  • summerdown2 13y ago
    > A certain percentage of the population would stop working entirely since they no longer need to. Everyone I've ever seen argue this has had strong opinions about how other (more greedy and venal) people would act. They, of course, would still work, but the great unwashed masses would sit on their backsides and take the money. I suggest, instead, we try specifics. Given a basic income, I wouldn't be lazy. Nor would anyone I know, which includes some very poor people who would love to work if they could only do better than on benefits. I suspect (though I don't know), that you wouldn't be lazy, either. Also, the evidence of limited trials is that this increases work, not idle people: eg http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html > The BIG is a form of social protection, which reduces poverty and supports pro-poor economic growth.
• smothers 13y ago
  An interesting repercussion of such a system is the potential for unrestrained creative endeavour. Fear of meeting basic needs will no longer be the primary motivator for most workers. Free to think of and most importantly act on new ideas, our massive population will be able to attempt to function like a distributed network. There will be those who choose to only consume, but that is no different today, many people are simply required to perform a meaningless job in order to do so. I would imagine that the benefit of freeing millions of willing inventors outweighs the drain imposed by all those who only consume. Then again, this only makes sense assuming that most repetitive and "busy" work can be automated.
• diydsp 13y ago
  Ok, yes to: "towards" and "trends." However, not "forces" the bring us "all the way to." OP misses the point that even though I am listening to free electronica on youtube right now... 1. It was once sold for money by its creators 2. Its creators tolerate it being given away for free in order to develop their reputations and bring in an income through performance and sales. This an example of symbiotic capitalism, not volunteer work. 3. My listening is driving ad revenue for google. So it's not really free out of the goodness of the creator's heart. It's free +to me right now+, b/c atm I'm not currently in its "for-pay whirlpool." Advertisers, clubs and music afficiandos are in its for-pay whirlpool. Finally. OP claims "we are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose, but not money." This is only true for a small cluster of artisans.
  • milesskorpen 13y ago
    But what about Deviant Art, Wikipedia, and most of YouTube? Also, a lot of musicians can barely afford to eat, even with touring. I imagine it would be liberating if that wasn't even necessary.
• jeffasinger 13y ago
  One worry I have with Basic Income discussion is that what most people think the minimum required just to live is very high, which frames the discussion wrong. Basic Income probably shouldn't cover much beyond rent in cheap, shared accommodation, heat and some electric, and groceries, and healthcare, if that is provided separately.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    Basic Income should never be enough to live comfortably on with no drain on savings, at least until we've reached a place where we don't need human labor for very many tasks (if ever). I say this as an avid supporter of a basic income.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Basic Income should never be enough to live comfortably on with no drain on savings, at least until we've reached a place where we don't need human labor for very many tasks (if ever). Its seems to me to be self-evidentally economically impossible for universal BI to do this (which, incidentally, means it probably can't replace all existing social benefit programs, because you probably still want to have some programs that people can live on without a drain on savings, though these would need to be time limited and almost certainly have other qualifications) unless we've reached that point of labor-irrelevance. If you set the level of BI such that it would allow such comfortable living given pre-BI prices, the resulting effect on prices would quickly drive such comfortable living back out of reach for those relying solely on BI. You can mitigate poverty and economic inequality with BI, because the inflationary effects will be no greater than the income boost given at the low end of the scale, but there is a declining marginal benefit of each additional dollar of BI.
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        It may be impossible, but that's certainly not self-evident. We tax things other than labor, and that portion is liable to grow as we approach irrelevance of labor - and not irrelevance broadly, but specifically as is necessary to provide that comfortable life. That said, I'm not hugely stressed about determining precisely how impossible a policy is when I don't support it anyway.
• crazygringo 13y ago
  > "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers. Far better is higher tax rates on investments, and higher taxes on the rich. We should be taxing the people who own the corporations, or are paid huge salaries by them -- that is, if you believe in progressive taxation.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > If anything, taxing corporations is regressive No, its not. > the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. It increases producer prices which shifts the supply curve to the right, but its pretty self-evident that the effect on actual prices is dependent on price elasticity of demand in the markets for particular products, and that price elasticity of demand is not independent of the income of the people in the market for the product. > Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers. No more than taxing labor income (which the US does disproportionately, as much capital income faces lower income tax rates and labor income is subject to additional, non-income taxes) is really taxing corporate stockholders, because it shifts the supply curve for labor increasing market clearing prices of labor and eating into corporate profit margins. > We should be taxing the people who own the corporations, or are paid huge salaries by them -- that is, if you believe in progressive taxation. But taxing high salaries is "regressive", just as much as taxing corporations, taxing consumers -- after all, if you shift the supply curve for management work and increase the market clearing price of that good, you are increasing producer costs and, therefore, shifting the supply curve for the good produced in a way which increases the market clearing cost, resulting in price increases to the consumer to pay the taxes. If you are going to make this argument for corporate taxes, you have to apply it to whatever you present as the alternative to corporate taxes, as well.
    • crazygringo 13y ago
• typorrhea 13y ago
  What is the advantage of doing this in terms of "income" and "currency" rather than in terms of "rations" and "allotments"? Is it a purely rhetorical difference?
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    Basic income in the form of currency is fungible and cumulative with other income, rations/allotments, as usually understood, are non-fungible (for specific goods) and usually non-cumulative with other income (that is, a "ration" means you get that much and can get no more, rather than that you get a basic amount and can buy more freely.)
• drakeandrews 13y ago
  The big issue with UBI entirely replacing the welfare system is that it ignores those who require more money due to disabilities. Person X can subsist on £Y/week, but person Z needs fooprazatine which costs a non-negligable quantity of £Y (there are also other, more nuanced scenarios but drugs come to mind first). Of course there are ways around it and medical benefit fraud is already incredibly low (it's hard to fake that you need a carer or an expensive regimen of drugs (painkillers notwithstanding)).
• mk3 13y ago
  Worthless blabber. Giving people good social guarantees leads to more people unwilling to work. If you want examples take a look to Norway. Also another dumb question how the hell this article ended up in frontpage of Hacker News in first place?
• jchrisa 13y ago
  Obligatory link to "What's Wrong with a Free Lunch" a short synopsis of the main arguments and responses of people against basic income. http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0807047139 http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...
• sliverstorm 13y ago
  Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on. Maybe we at least start with "enough to live somewhat uncomfortably on"? That way nobody starves or goes without basic necessities, but still have an incentive to improve their lot- and it isn't that hard, because they are on the cusp of living comfortably. Another important factor, IMO, is how you index how much the income should be. Do you index it based on where the recipient lives? (I.e. everyone who lives in New York should get enough to live comfortably in New York) Do you index it based on average nationwide cost of living? Personally I'd be inclined to the latter.
• h0w412d 13y ago
  There was an experiment with this called Mincome in Canada. They found that the only two groups of people who worked less were new moms and teenagers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    Note that "Guaranteed Minimum Income" is something else. From my reading Mincome is in fact a Basic Income system, despite the name, though I'm by no means an expert on the experiment.
• medell 13y ago
  Read NPR's beautiful article "UNFIT FOR WORK - The startling rise of disability in America" if you're not convinced on the costs of the current system and how people cheat it. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
• JonSkeptic 13y ago
  The author of this is article is more than a little bit out of touch. To be honest, HN is the only place I have ever even heard people discuss the concept of an Unconditional Basic Income or call Bitcoin a "radical economic ideology". Most people in the US have never even heard of Bitcoin or an Unconditional Basic Income. The author is so far removed from reality that it's almost humorous. He cites an example where Instagram has apparently replaced Kodak, an example as ignorant as it is misguided. Having known one of Kodak's chief inventors from before the company began its steep decline, it is evident that Kodak collapsed from a series of bad decisions and a failure to secure its territory in IP space. Comparing that to Instagram isn't a comparison of apples to oranges, it's a comparison of oranges to a desk lamp. I could go on, but there's no need. This article is crap factually, logically, and intellectually. I understand that the title panders to the closely held ideologies of many on these boards, but if you have to look this hard to find arguments for why we're moving toward a UBI, then we're probably not moving toward it at all.
  • tomkarlo 13y ago
    Agreed... he lost me as soon as he cited that idiotic Kodak to Instagram concept. The idea that the 13 people at Instagram are the effective replacement for all of Kodak's business (while ignoring the 500K-odd people involved in building the phones instagram runs on) is so dumb it's galling.
  • TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > Most people in the US have never even heard of Bitcoin or an Unconditional Basic Income. Most people also don't understand technology and what it means that, to quote a Portal poster, "Robots are SMARTER than you, Robots work HARDER than you" [0]. Those people who have never heard of UBI will also, in 30 years, never hear of their jobs again. [0] - http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Karla_the_Complainer?file=BuhdK.jpg http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Karla_the_Complainer?file=Bu...
  • ihateloggingin 13y ago
    I agree that this isn't a great article. However, Bitcoin is a radical economic ideology, and UBI is certainly not limited to HN -- it's been discussed all over the world for decades. Most people might not have heard of it, but they have not heard of most political ideas in general.
• josephlord 13y ago
  I really like the concept (and have for at least a decade and a half). The linked article misses one thing which is that minimum wage legislation can probably be removed too. What I don't know is actually what the level of the basic income could realistically be at what levels of income tax (I assume that there would be a single flat tax rate for all income additional to the Basic Income). It would be great to get good statistics of earned/savings income distributions for a few countries and current income tax, capital gains tax and National Insurance takes and build a tool to see what incomes and rates a feasible. I picture being able to adjust basic income and see the effect on the tax rate and vice versa. Ideally you could make the income distribution adjustable so that you could try different scenarios such as the effect of more people doing no work. I'm not sure how children should be handled in these models either as there are real costs and you don't want child poverty but you don't want to make breeding too profitable which may occur if they attracted the full rate Basic Income.
• unclebucknasty 13y ago
  >"...wealth creation will increasingly be confined to those with capital, and things start to follow a Marxist logic. The middle classes (and their elected representatives) will not let that happen." In the absence of real campaign finance reform, is the middle class really that empowered to "not let this happen" through their elected representatives? Those representatives, after all, are currently much more beholden to their financial masters--the corporations and its wealthier beneficiaries (executives, prominent shareholders) which provide large campaign donations. Not that it can't change. There are just a lot of steps between here and there.
• stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  Here's an in-depth analysis in the form of a documentary[1] (German audio, English subtitles). [1]: http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the_basic_income_2008/ http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the_basic_income_2008/
• dgallagher 13y ago
  Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on. The only condition is citizenship and/or residency. Sweet! None of us have to work anymore! Party at my place every night for life! You get the basic income whether or not you’re employed, any wages you earn are additional. Few, that's a relief. It'll be nice to close all of the school's down and tell kids they can go home, play video games indefinitely, and never have to worry about their future again. The welfare bureaucracy is largely dismantled. No means testing, no signing on, no bullying young people into stacking shelves for free, no separate state pension. Down with welfare, up with communism! Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal. Hey boss, fuck you! Why? Because fuck you, that's why! What are you going to do about it? Fire me? Ha! People work for jobs that are available in order to increase their disposable income. That's cool. Make sure to tax them high enough to pay for all of my house parties. Large swathes of the economy are replaced by volunteerism, a continuation of the current trend. Who wants to volunteer to clean my toilet and mow my lawn? Anyone? Even if I say thank you when you're done? The system would be harder to cheat when there’s only a single category of claimant, with no extraordinary allowances. I can't figure a way to game it either; it's mathematically and economically perfect!
  • FreakyT 13y ago
    I agree with these concerns; I really can't see how a system like this would possibly work. Why would anyone do anything if they had no incentive to work?
    • gems 13y ago
      I can't tell if you're trolling. I would say most mathematicians and scientists are enthusiasts. Many programmers are also enthusiasts. I don't even have to specify the occupation. All I have to say is that "some people are enthusiasts and would continue to produce anyway".
    • unclebucknasty 13y ago
      I think that's just it. Under our current system, that's what people believe because that's what we've been taught to believe in order to make the system work. But, if we were free from the need to earn income, would we all just curl up and die? Or, would we pursue other interests and make (perhaps even more valuable) contributions to society? In fact, when you look at the financial incentives our society provides, they are frequently misaligned with their net value to society. But, that's another discussion. The author makes the point that even now, much work is done for free and given away (software, music, content creation and information curation, etc.) Then, remember, this is just a basic, livable income. There is still financial incentive for those who desire more. Not having to work to live may be the best thing to ever happen to the planet. :)
• codex 13y ago
  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
• jeffdavis 13y ago
  Though some more reasonable forms of this idea exist, this particular description has some major problems: * What if the money you pay someone does not go as far as expected? Maybe they lose some of the money in various ways, or maybe they are just very bad at negotiating economic transactions or buy the wrong kinds of things from the wrong places. Maybe they are trying to live in an expensive area -- do we kick them out? * There will be a significant class of people who simply know nothing at all about work or participation in the economy. That may have all kinds of bad effects for those people, one of which may be a greater likelihood of the problem above. * Some people who would otherwise be productive will put off both education and work for a while. When the time comes that they want to be involved, it will be hard for them to make the transition, and many will just stay out of the workforce forever. So, some of the ultra-productive people the author is expecting to do the heavy lifting will not exist. * There will be pressure to stop granting new citizenship/residency to almost anyone, because the potential cost will go way up. Even if, in the long term, immigrants are good for the economy, in the short term it could be crushing if each one gets a comfortable living regardless of work. * There will be an imbalance in which jobs are actually done. The number of computer programmers might be higher, but the number of nurses might go way down. If having a nurse is required to make some people comfortable, how do we remedy that? * "Comfort" in general is a moving target in this process because changing the basic income will have a big effect on the economy. It's hard to say whether you could ever really find a stable value that offers anything resembling "comfort" for those living on it.
  • mrgoldenbrown 13y ago
    If the number of nurses willing to work for current rates goes down, then the market rate for nurses will go up. Eventually it will be high enough that being a nurse is more attractive than being a programmer.
    • TheFuture 13y ago
      The market rate for investment bankers is more attractive than my job. Doesn't mean I can just be an investment banker tomorrow. Or a nurse. If I live comfortably on my basic income doing whatever, how do I become qualified to work? Remember we have college grads who aren't qualified to work, and they've spent their entire lives being educated.
• tokenadult 13y ago
  I see no one in this active discussion has mentioned yet Charles Murray's book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 in which Murray goes into detail about how much a program of guaranteed income for everyone would cost in the United States, and some probable effects that would have on everyone's everyday behavior. I read the book a year or two after it was published. Murray's own summary of his argument http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc242a.pdf http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc242a.pdf and reviews of his book http://www.aei.org/article/society-and-culture/poverty/in-our-hands-a-plan-to-replace-the-welfare-state-article/ http://www.aei.org/article/society-and-culture/poverty/in-ou... http://www.conallboyle.com/BasicIncomeNewEcon/MurrayReview.pdf http://www.conallboyle.com/BasicIncomeNewEcon/MurrayReview.p... http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/region_focus/2006/fall/pdf/book_review.pdf http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/region_focu... http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=296 http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=296 may inform the discussion here. Big public policy proposals are not easy to discuss, but the big public policy proposal of a guaranteed basic income for all is a response to existing policy of supposedly targeted social welfare programs that are just about equally expensive, but more costly to administer.
  • btilly 13y ago
    The other problem with "targeted social welfare programs" is that it is very easy to dislike programs that someone else (particularly someone that you don't like) benefits from. A program that you yourself benefit from tends to be less likely to get eroded by future politicians. Compare welfare and social security for a classic example of the difference.
    • beachstartup 13y ago
      see welfare vs. disability
      • 127001brewer 13y ago
        As I have just posted elsewhere in this thread, disability seems to be a type of "basic income". [1] [1] http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ Edited for clarity.
• baltcode 13y ago
  This will be another nail in the coffin for the rights of those who are already neglected[1] in the current system : stateless people, and unpopular minorities who can be made stateless. 1. The neglected non-citizen: statelessness and liberal political theory. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449626.2011.558733#.Ud7krtJOSfU http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449626.2011.558...
• deweller 13y ago
  This will not happen in the United States of America in our lifetime.
• aneth4 13y ago
  I agree that a basic income may be the best solution to the decline in demand for labor. And I consider myself economically conservative. There is still much to be learned about the societal effect. Its something we need to consider as an alternative to social upheaval. However other parts of this article concern me, in particular: "Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal." Employment laws should be entirely at will in such a system. Workers should fear dismissal. And after all, they have a basic income to fall back on. Combining basic income with "liberal" employment law would be a disaster.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    I don't think you understand what "liberalised" employment law means, since it means movement in the direction (if not necessarily to the exact point) you are arguing for in arguing against it.
    • deleted 13y ago
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    • deleted 13y ago
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    • aneth4 13y ago
      Well, "liberalised" as a general term doesn't mean anything, so I wouldn't say I "don't understand" it. The language is ambiguous, but you may be correct on second thought.
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Well, "liberalised" as a general term doesn't mean anything With economic policy, it always means reduced regulation in favor of increased reliance on mutual consent of the parties.
        • aneth4 13y ago
          Well I'm all for that outside of safety, transparency, and abuse regulations.
• bsbechtel 13y ago
  Arguments like this are completely selling ourselves short on our ability as a species/society to innovate and come up with new ideas that improve our life for everyone. I'm sorry, but it drives me absolutely nuts! Come on guys, are we really saying that we aren't capable of continuing to come up with new ideas and grow them into sustainable businesses that lift a majority of Americans out of poverty?? What a positive, optimistic this author has on our future, not to mention his faith in the capabilities of fellow human beings. Instead of jumping into many of the circular arguments below of where costs are truly incurred from things such as taxes on the rich and on corporations, let's think of taxation in a different way - as valves controlling where capital flows in our economy. Think of taxes as valves in a hydraulic system or switches/relays in an electrical system. If those valves aren't directing the right amount of electricity or hydraulic oil to the right parts of the system, the entire system stops working. In the same line of thinking, if not enough capital is going to the right places in our economy, our economy slows down and stops working. So, the question becomes, where do we need to adjust the valves to get the entire system working again? Where can we cut taxes, to give that sector of the economy a boost? It's small businesses, innovators/inventors, and early stage startups. Why? Because if 1 out of every 1,000 businesses started turns into the next Microsoft or GM and employs 100,000 people, then we need 10m people out of work right now/100,000 jobs per Microsoft startup*1,000 startup businesses = 100,000 startups. There's a reason the first round of capital for starting a company typically comes from friends and family - because it's extremely risky, and those closest to the entrepreneur can make that investment at the lowest risk possible because they have insider knowledge of the entrepreneur's skillset. If we have a disappearing middle class, that means that very first round of capital is disappearing too, because it comes from the middle class, which means 10 years from now, we will have even fewer jobs for the middle class. I'll leave it up to everyone else to debate how we can get more money into the hands of the middle class, but taxing the rich and providing a basic income for everyone is not the answer.
  • TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > Come on guys, are we really saying that we aren't capable of continuing to come up with new ideas and grow them into sustainable businesses that lift a majority of Americans out of poverty? Of course we are. The best of those ideas involve robots and weak AIs systematically replacing humans in everything they do. What the author says is that the way to innovate ourselves out of this situation and end up well is not by doing more of the same. Capitalism is going to die as energy abundance and automation will make manufacturing essencially free, and smarter software will do the same to most service and knowledge jobs.
• Balgair 13y ago
  If money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country,( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money ) then what are persons who receive this money paying? What changes hands? The state gives Chad cash and he gives them what in return? Is a minimum income even money anymore?
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    This is inane. So long as people in general are willing to accept it in exchange for goods and services and repayment of debts, it's money. Even if it somehow wasn't "money" per that definition but a money-like item that worked the same as "money" in all contexts but one, how is that an objection? Wikipedia's phrasing of the definition of "money" provides some kind of moral obligation?
• csomar 13y ago
  We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes. As I mentioned above, corporate profit margins have hit an all time high, and that money will circulate far faster if it’s placed in the hands of consumers. This is very wrong when you think about large scale. The model simply can't work when you apply it to all the population. Think about the point when it'll break. There is no free money. Giving money to someone by taxing someone else, is not a stable equation. This will create a tension between those who produce and those who consumes. Corporations will move to States/Countries with better tax schemes. My strategy is simpler: Liberalize everything. Everybody pays for his own consumption; and shared resources are paid by people equally. There should be no taxes, and also no subventions. That means people pays for the gov. bills equally. Well, but that's only on my perfect world view.
• marc0 13y ago
  Just imagine what one could do with one's life, backed by an unconditional income! One could strip off parts of the daily worries; one could try out more things; one could develop ideas, big ideas, without having to fear that a possible failure risks your and your family's lives. Today, only very few people with a solid financial background can afford to work on big ideas. What a waste! Think of all those geniuses out there who can't just afford to take the time to read a book because they have to work so hard to feed their families! I also want to argue, that merely the knowledge that you can't completely fail in your working life will cause a huge benefit for public health, physical and mental. I would bet that many diseases would just disappear, due to the lowering of the general distress level.
  • marc0 13y ago
    Actually, let me add that I would like to see another development which is something like a compromise on the unconditional income: Sabatticals. Sabatticals or semi-sabbaticals should be mandatory. Just imagine what a powerful motivation it would be for anybody, knowing that working hard for a few years will earn you a year off. Then imagine, what one could do during the sabbatical, learn, explore, re-think one's live ... And finally, imagine yourself at the end of your life, looking back saying "yes, maybe I got a bad a job, but I did so many great things during my sabbaticals, so non, je ne regrette rien ..."
• anExcitedBeast 13y ago
  Nothing about this would work. Significantly fewer corporations with a drastically smaller workforce paying greatly increased tax rates with a substantially weaker dollar to benefit an unthinkably higher quantity of citizens? I assume we still want to keep our military, education, and surveillance programs funded, too. It simply does not math.
• iheart2code 13y ago
  How would a system like this scale to different regions? I can see this working in a smaller country, not the US. I would need a much larger subsistence wage to survive in the SF bay area than I would in most other places in the country. And if certain (already overcrowded) regions are allowed larger wages, you'd probably see people flocking there for the increased wages. I can also see this placing strain on the system for the first few decades if people decide to have more children, since both parents don't need to work anymore.
  • ihateloggingin 13y ago
    > I would need a much larger subsistence wage to survive in the SF bay area than I would in most other places in the country. Plenty of people live in the SF bay area with no BI at all.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    Scaling it by region such that the increased benefits are greater than the increased expense is an obviously horrible idea. I think that scaling it by region at all is a bad idea, but am receptive to the notion that a slight increase might work out better if someone wants to present numbers.
• iheart2code 13y ago
  How would a system like this scale to different regions? I can see this working in a smaller country, not the US. I would need a much larger subsistence wage to survive in the SF bay area than I would in most other places in the country. And if certain (already overcrowded) regions are allowed larger wages, you'd probably see people flocking there for the increased wages. I can also see this placing strain on the system for the first few decades if people decide to have more children, since both parents don't need to work anymore.
• yaddayadda 13y ago
  I find it interesting that the author mentions BitCoin early on, but then never addresses how an Unconditional Basic Income would work if corporations switched to BitCoin or other anonymous, decentralized monetary system. In concept, I'm a firm proponent of a Unconditional Basic Income/Guaranteed Minimum Income/Negative Income Tax, but I think BitCoin is going to be a prohibitive cog in the financial wheel.
  • ihateloggingin 13y ago
    BitCoin is not anonymous. Cash is anonymous. Why don't international corporations just exchange briefcases full of $100 bills right now?
• lettergram 13y ago
  I disagree with this article almost entirely. Yes, labor jobs are on the decline, but service jobs are staying steady if not increasing. The "demand for unconditional basic income" is a joke, yes it's possible to attempt to initiate something where every person receives $10,000 a year, but the money has to come from somewhere. If the money for this basic income comes from taxation, then both the government loses net income and the corporations lose as well. You can think about it an entropy or friction, there is always a cost for doing something. If corporations essentially pay their customers (via the government) to buy their goods the world would eventually collapse. If the money for basic income comes from printing money (or equivalent) it devalues to insignificant amounts too quick to do virtually anything with it. This idea is a fantasy, perhaps the population of the world needs to DECREASE to maintain its stability in a technological world. If there are less jobs, maybe there's less need for humans.. If this is the case, perhaps it is time to move to Mars or something, like a cell that has replicated enough DNA/organelles to split in two and create a new daughter cell. You cannot suitably hold by basic unconditional income. Any college economics class/text book would probably make this much more clearer than I, but the "trends," conclusions and potential sources for the basic income would fall apart under close inspection. For example, if the need for labor decreases, the cost of labor decreases (the net company expense), therefore people may have worse pay, but also the products are cheaper. The point is basic economic theory define this as an impossibility.
  • SapphireSun 13y ago
    300,000,000 people in the US. You give them each 10,000 dollars. That's 3T dollars, or roughly the size of the existing federal budget (~3.5T). US GDP is ~16T. It's a lot, but that's not beyond the pale of possibility, and the poorest people will spend that money nearly instantly, reving the economy and making the world a little bit better for everyone. "If corporations essentially pay their customers (via the government) to buy their goods the world would eventually collapse." I feel like this betrays a misunderstanding of how money works. First of all, 10k per person isn't enough to create an extreme situation. Secondly, it is the circulation of money that drives progress. If companies didn't disperse the money they accumulate somehow, the economy would stall. On a more noble level, giving people the option to not work is simply removing additional coercive elements from society. People should be free to choose what they wish to do with their lives. 10k isn't enough to remove the incentive to better yourself, but it is enough of a cushion so that you don't need to submit to awful situations simply to survive. If janitorial tasks become in high demand, they will pay appropriately or design machines to do it - just like everything else.
• COOLIO5676 13y ago
  My vote goes toward less hours, and higher wages. it's another way of solving the same issues. Everyone could work half as much, for twice as much, and you still double employment.
  • TeMPOraL 13y ago
    This doesn't compute. 1/2 work * 2x wages * 2x employment = 8 * cost per unit of work done.
• MattyRad 13y ago
  While I think this article makes some sweeping generalizations and assumptions, the question it poses is what's important. If we as programmers continue to automate the world (as is our job), and as previous jobs therein are rendered unnecessary, how does one reallocate the workforce? Is the workforce unnecessary at that point?
  • ihateloggingin 13y ago
    We just need to adjust social attitudes so that it's accepted that passive income is the right of everyone, not just 1%.
• aidenn0 13y ago
  The single biggest issue with BI is that there is some fraction of the population that will fritter it away and starve. Most people proposing BI are economic liberals so have the point of view "If we gave them enough money to live off of and they wasted it, it's no longer our problem" but that doesn't sit will with the rest of the population that aren't economic liberals. Even if you buy into that view, you still have to deal with the increased crime from starving desperate people; it costs a lot more than $10k per year to keep someone incarcerated, so inevitably non-violent offenders will be paroled only to offend again. [edit] Perhaps those downvoting me could let me know why? I'd like to know how my comment detracts from the conversation on this article.
• antitrust 13y ago
  The problem with unconditional basic income is that there's no incentive to do anything beyond the minimum. Like most utopian plans, this idea relies on the belief that humans will get up and do things in large numbers. We can't even get them to voluntarily recycle and quit beating their kids.
  • ihsw 13y ago
    It's becoming increasingly clear that some people can't work despite their willingness. Full-time job growth is at an all-time low while temporary job growth is at an all-time high. Most of the jobs gained since 2008 have been temporary jobs or jobs with too few hours.
    • antitrust 13y ago
      I think that's an entirely separate argument. Do you? The fact that right now the economy stinks (P-U) and that some people who want to work, cannot, does not really have any bearing on future plans for guaranteed basic income.
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    You've probably got a pretty good job right now, and some decent savings, right? Why? Surely you could quit your job, find a much simpler one with less responsibilities, and move into a trailer and subside on tubers and rice. Much cheaper, you don't have to work nearly as hard, and less responsibility! Of course you wouldn't do this because you like the lifestyle that your job allows you to have (and likely like your job as well). The ability to be poor and not die does not automatically make people satisfied with being poor.
  • MartinCron 13y ago
    The problem with unconditional basic income is that there's no incentive to do anything beyond the minimum Actually, that's the problem with with means-based social programs, as there's an incentive not to work to get more stuff. We can't even get them to voluntarily recycle and quit beating their kids. Oh, never mind, you're just trolling.
  • 13y ago
• sbhere 13y ago
  > - You get the basic income whether or not you’re employed, any wages you earn are additional. > > - The welfare bureaucracy is largely dismantled. No means testing, no signing on, no bullying young people into stacking shelves for free, no separate state pension. Self-contradiction.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    Not in the slightest. It takes more bureaucracy to administer a system where decisions need to be made. If there's some other problem you're seeing, you'll need to use more than one word to convey it.
• conanbatt 13y ago
  I actually think Argentina would be a great place to impose basic income. Argentina has a long time standing issue with 'welfare' programs being abused in corruptive ways, such as government employees cashing in, their relatives, etc. Middle class despises the way those funds are used because they are not regulated or productive: as a foreign national, you could get welfare within 6 months of moving in to argentina. Plus free college education. Also, argentina has a long-time standing issue with inflation, which in this case could be worked to its benefit, which is it can fund this strategy. Currently, the government uses welfare programs to target vulnerable sectors and generate dependency, but if everyone got it, they wouldnt have that kind of edge anymore, and if they wanted to better one sector, they would be forced to help every sector. But i will still think that although basic income is very forward-thinking, it has veery unforeseen consequences. We dont know what is going to happen to a city or a country if such a thing is implemented, for better or worse, in terms of sociology, more than economics. I also wonder how to actually make it practical. By basic supply and demand, this should create a strong increase in demand, which raises prices and the very basic income would then become less effective.
• joejohnson 13y ago
  >>>As Jaron Lanier points out, Kodak once provided 140,000 middle class jobs, and in the smouldering ruins of that company’s bankruptcy we have Instagram, with 13 employees. This argument is just plain wrong. Kodak was not replaced by Instagram. Kodak was replaced by Apple and Samsung and a bunch of other asian manufacturers. They have way more than 13 employees.
• zxcdw 13y ago
  I don't understand how people oppose unconditional basic income without also opposing the fact that automation decreases the amount of working hours available for a person(or in other words, the amount of jobs), and thus decreases the amount of income per person, while maintaining productivity stable if not increasing it, thus making all sorts of goods cheaper. Someone enlighten me. These discussions always seem so damn complex and heated for some reason. What am I missing, when I believe that UBI/BIG(basic income guarantee) is the future, and that in future people don't need to work 40 hours a week? Before anyone counters with saying that "people don't need to work and thus just leech the system", I will cover this now. People will need to work, because UBI/BIG will not cover anything but the very basic income. This means cheap housing, cheap food, clothing and whatever else is considered basic income. Perhaps this would be something like 800 USD per month, or 200 per week, give or take some. People would most definitely want to have more income, and as such they would want to work. A full 40 hour week? Perhaps not -- maybe 20 or 30 hours a week. Whatever they feel fit best for them. (note that I live in a country with the nordic welfare system, where most people live on a rent rather than own a house, which perhaps makes a difference, or then not. I don't know, hence why I discuss.)
  • cheald 13y ago
    Automation reduces costs and prices, creates new job fields, and permits for specialization. It's been happening since the cotton gin, and is a basic staple of an advancing society. We're able to sit on our butts in our chairs and make our livings punching keys on a little rectangle while staring at another little glowing rectangle because our societies are highly specialized and highly automated, making it economically viable for us to purchase and consume goods produced two thousand miles away, rather than having to spend our time tending our gardens so we can make sure that we have food to eat this week. Bemoaning automation as the death of the common man's ability to feed himself is just as silly as it was in Eli Whitney's time. People will only need to stop working when automation reaches the point that their needs are met without it imposing a burden of work on anyone else. Of course, this will be the point at which the robot revolution will begin, and humanity is doomed.
    • rbellio 13y ago
• forgotAgain 13y ago
  But then we'd all have to die at thirty.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    ... why?
    • forgotAgain 13y ago
      Attempt (failed obviously) to pull in Logan's Run.
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        Ah, I wondered about that, but the numbers didn't match when I hit Wikipedia, so I figured I'd missed something.
• jeena 13y ago
  Shouldn't we also kind of tax machine work and not only human work?
• skndstry 13y ago
  In Switzerland there are over 100'000 people that support the idea, which means the public gets to vote on it in the next 2-3 years. http://bedingungslos.ch/ http://bedingungslos.ch/
• tocomment 13y ago
  I read this thread his morning and I'm having a really difficult time figuring out how the discussion has changed since then. Which comments are new? Which comments are valuable? Does anyone else have this problem on HN? Any solutions?
  • hackinthebochs 13y ago
    I have that problem a lot in active discussions. I tend to comment in the good ones so I generally just look at the time of my last comment and skim the post times to see which ones came since then. This sounds like a good opportunity for an HN browser extension or greasemonkey script.
  • nollidge 13y ago
    I use a Chrome extension called Hacker News Enhancement Suite, and I'm sure there's other such options: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
• mathattack 13y ago
  I like this conceptually, but where you set that wage is the tricky part. If most folks don't have to work, most won't. Less people to tax too. That will in turn cause inflation, as there's less supply of goods. Then you'd have to increase the wage to follow suit. To get any kind of equilibrium that preserves an incentive to work, you'd need that universal payment to be fairly low. This isn't to say, "Don't do it" - it's just to be careful with it.
• dkrich 13y ago
  I think the main problem with this argument that software is eating everything and automation is replacing jobs is that it imagines the world as it is today, with the current set of jobs as fixed. Lest we forget a time when all goods were physical and there were no digital goods. The extent of what can be consumed by technology does have limits. But more than that, we as a society become wealthier, not poorer, when things become faster, cheaper, and easier to produce. There was a time when people spent nearly half their income on food because food production was an incredibly inefficient process. Eventually much of food processing became automated and advances made it much more plentiful. What had a larger impact on the economy? The millions of people no longer needing to spend valuable time producing food, or the fact that people now had much more disposable income to spend on other things?
  • kokey 13y ago
    That's the thing, instead of giving people a universal basic income and distorting the prices we should really keep on striving to make the essentials that people need as cheap as possible.
    • guard-of-terra 13y ago
      Which basically means things that do not scale will skyrocket in price. You already see this as prices of education and housing grow decade to decade. Essentials are: bad food that doesn't taste well, bad housing, bad medical care, bad transportation and bad service. That's what Soviet Union consistently delivered to every citizen and while there were vitrually no hungry, unemployed or homeless people, nobody felt happy too, everybody fought to be able to afford a tiny bit of something of quality. In short, cheap essentials are not so cool.
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        Also, we're talking about world where robots produce those cheap essentials out of soil and solar/nuclear power, leaving many more unemployed competing for ever shrinking pool of jobs that are not done by robots out of free solar/nuclear power. Basically it's not any kind of a solution, it's exactly where we are headed now.
• dannypgh 13y ago
  I think it would make a lot of sense to have a BI and to also double-down in R&D to improve all levels of understanding and capabilities in the fields of AI and robotics. The protestant work ethic is deeply engrained in this society, but perhaps now we should be thinking in terms of "how do we free as many people as possible for pursuits they haven't yet found" -- and investing heavily in removing jobs that the most hours are worked in. The necessary investment in all levels and types of STEM would be huge, and the result would be tons of technology that can be used to replace current work. To prevent the technology from simply being used to make a very small number of people rich, vast amounts (if not all) of the research should be released as free & open source technology. I do admit however that FOSS is not a pancea to address concerns of excessive wealth concentration - and taxes will continue to play that role. In a sense, the wealth created by the increases in automation will be captured back in the form of taxes, and use to fund additional investment in automation as well as a basic income to sustain all the residents of the society which decided that it was worthwhile to try to abolish work, instead of continuing to fetishize it as a moral obligation.
• dorkrawk 13y ago
  What happens if I squander my basic income on something frivolous and I can't get a job? Wouldn't there still need to be social programs to prevent people who fuck up from just starving to death? How would a basic income coexist with current systems of debt? Could this exist without VAST healthcare reform? What happens when people get (expensively) sick? Who gets a basic income? Every citizen over 18? Every non dependent? Isn't a basic income for someone with 5 kids fundamentally different than a single person? Wouldn't a basic income even in the same state be vastly different (say Chicago vs Urbana in Illinois)? This is certainly an interesting idea and I'm interested in people's thoughts on these and other details.
  • TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Food and basic healthcare should be free. Literally free. There's no reason for it not to be in the future, in the very same condition that encourage us to adopt BI. And if people won't eat even then... well, there's only so much you can do if the other person doesn't want to live.
  • ihateloggingin 13y ago
    When someone has so lost control of himself that he can't feed himself -- even though he has the money to do so -- we put him into custody in a hospital, and hopefully rehabilitate him. That's severe mental disorder. You're absolutely right about healthcare; you can't replace public healthcare with a basic income.
• mikeurbanski 13y ago
  My favorite quote about this comes from Douglas Rushkoff: "Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff." Are jobs obsolete?: http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete...
• Mizza 13y ago
  Very excited to see more and more discussion around this concept - I think Universal Basic Income should be a goal for humanity in the 21st century.
• hosh 13y ago
  I think it would be better to focus on lowering the cost of living (approaching zero) than to provide an unconditional basic income.
• washedup 13y ago
  I disagree with the first couple facets of the new system definitions: "Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on. The only condition is citizenship and/or residency." - This is a government. "You get the basic income whether or not you’re employed, any wages you earn are additional." - This is welfare. "The welfare bureaucracy is largely dismantled. No means testing, no signing on, no bullying young people into stacking shelves for free, no separate state pension." - So a government run welfare program to replace the welfare bureaucracy. Doesn't sound to radical, in fact, it sounds the same. "The system would be harder to cheat when there’s only a single category of claimant, with no extraordinary allowances." - Some one can always cheat the system, and there will always be extraordinary allowances because there are people in the system whose desire is for those things. Opportunism has always been a part of evolution. Sure we don't "need" it
• justncase80 13y ago
  This reminds me of "For Us, The Living", by Robert Heinlein. Where he discusses a very similar society and explains the economics of how it might work: http://www.amazon.com/For-Us-The-Living-Customs/dp/0743491548 http://www.amazon.com/For-Us-The-Living-Customs/dp/074349154...
• brettinlj 13y ago
  Regarding this quote: "I’ve lived in a country that had a period of 'full employment' and now has 14% unemployment, and I don’t see how anyone can be so misanthropic to claim that those 14% of people just got lazier." I hesitate to take someone's radical economic ideas too seriously if they either can't do math or does not know the econ 101 definition of "full employment".
• klausjensen 13y ago
  We have a light version of this in Denmark. It makes a lot of people not want to work and is the main reason behind why the effective tax is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70%. Pay 45% income tax, 200% car tax (literally - a 10.000USD car costs 30.000USD), pay high property taxes, "green" taxes like on gas - and when that is done, please pay 25% VAT of everything you buy after that. And you know what? About 80% of the Danish love this system enough to not want to change it. A party suggesting a 40% flat tax is considered extreme in Denmark. I happen to hate it, but that is just me...
• adventured 13y ago
  100 million * $20,000 = $2 trillion No matter how you shake around the minimum income scales, you'll end up near those types of massive figures. That's $2 trillion dollars that doesn't exist right now and would have to be magically conjured up. And I suspect a comfortable wage would need to be higher than $20,000. I think the financial disaster of this arrangement would be closer to $3 trillion. It's mathematically impossible.
• jonnathanson 13y ago
  It's a fascinating idea, and it's a real challenge to market capitalism as we know it in the long run. But the biggest problem with any such system is unequal need. Need states are stochastic at the individual level. They might appear to be neater and more deterministic at the aggregate level, but a system designed in aggregate is bound to have challenges at the margins. I could easily see this system becoming, essentially, a fixed amount that just shifts everyone's personal needs/income graphs up by X amount a year. Above that point, everyone still needs income to fit any needs not met by X. An unintended consequence, for example, would be that this system places an extra burden on the disabled, or the parents of multiple children, or the elderly, etc., to take on more work to meet their greater needs. By eliminating need-based welfare and replacing it with a flat payment structure, we'd basically be handwaving away the fact that need states are variable. It's possible that I'm misunderstanding how this system works. And many of the same arguments I'm making against this system could certainly be leveled against our current system. I guess I'm struggling to see how this system has greater utility and fewer externalities than the current one.
• MartinCron 13y ago
  Friendly reminder: People work for all sorts of reasons, having enough money to not starve is just one of them. What's the first question people ask you when they meet you? In this country, it's usually "what do you do?" I'm just as OK with people being motivated to work by status or prestige or ego societal pressure as they are by the threat of financial ruin.
• kemofo 13y ago
  Taxes reward those who don't produce and punish those who do produce. But, taxes are the price of living in an organized society. Also, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Money isn't the problem, it's a lack of education about how money work that is the real problem. If you give poor or lazy people money it'll just find it's way back into the pockets of people who understand how money works (the rich). Even if we take everything from the rich, they'll just get it back because the average person, with no financial education, is incapable of preserving or creating wealth.