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It is distressing that so many have become 'useless' in this modern economy. I think we are all very aware of the problem as well as the fact that it is likely

It is distressing that so many have become 'useless' in this modern economy. I think we are all very aware of the problem as well as the fact that it is likely to get worse. What can be done? I have seen very little on this subject. Guaranteed basic income is probably a step in the right direction. At least such a system offers a real opportunity to drop what you are doing currently and sincerely try for a new career.

ahoy 13y ago
I like the universal basic income idea too, but haven't we gone through a similar crisis during the industrial revolution? How did we pull out of that? This is a genuine question, I'm a poor student of history.
- mberning 13y ago
  I think that the general consensus is that the industrial revolution did end up replacing many of the jobs that it eliminated, and then some, it just took time. This new revolution in automation may do the same, or it may not. I like to look at the very real possibility of self driving cars and trucks. How many truck drivers are employed today? They will be made obsolete very quickly once self driving trucks hit the market. Where are they going to turn for work? Are they going to suddenly become a programmer, writer, graphic designer, etc? I don't think so. Manual labor jobs were much more interchangeable than labors of the mind.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  We let people get hungry, and die of overworking. The survirvours inherited a more productive society.
  - Radim 13y ago
    Actually, it brought unprecedented power to the workers, balancing the power between employer/employee significantly. It certainly was a tough period (hardly alone in that respect!), but the romanticised images of starving children chained by ankles in sweltering mines, whereas they had happily capered about their sunny villages all day long prior to the revolution, are way off [0]. [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/why-workers-welcomed-long-hours-of-industrial-revolution.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/why-workers-welcome...
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      If you restrict your survey of the condition of the working class to those who have published autobiographies and memoirs, you will have a distorted view of the condition of most workers during the period.
      - Radim 13y ago
        If you're referring to the linked article: it's true I haven't read her books, but I hope that a leading UK scholarly expert on the industrial revolution would have taken your point into account!
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's not clear that we ever did pull out of it. A certain small class of people who couldn't move away from agriculture, say Native Americans who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyles, suffered tremendously as the country industrialized and the valuable land was taken over for industrial agriculture. They have never recovered, and are the poorest people in the U.S. to this day. What this means is that people need to move to whatever is next, and those who don't, or more importantly can't, will be left behind. But what's next? During the industrial revolution, people moved to cities to go work in factories. But what's the way forward today? Arguably the key difference between today and back then is that the industrial revolution caused a change in where labor was demanded, while the automation revolution reduces the need for labor across almost all sectors of the economy. Yes, some people need to program the machines, but not that many. After all, during the industrial revolution it wasn't mechanical engineering that offered job opportunities for the masses. To me, the obvious "what's next" is this: those whose jobs are obsoleted by automation personally service those whose jobs aren't. It's possible that the future of America is 2/3 of the population acting as nannies, personal assistants, etc, to the 1/3 whose jobs haven't been automated. I bet there are a ton of people even now who would cook/clean/etc for $5/hour + board. You'd already see this in the U.S. if it wasn't for the minimum wage/welfare. What happens when automation drives the price of unskilled labor down to $2-3/hour? The U.S. becomes Bangladesh is what happens. I think it's a social disaster in the making, but I struggle to think of alternatives.
  - jonnathanson 13y ago
    Essentially, this is the road back to serfdom. The key difference being that Medieval serfs worked land on behalf of landowners, whereas in this scenario, they simply provide services. I agree that it's a social disaster in the making, but I suspect it's a real possibility.
  - LiweiZ 13y ago
    I believe the key to this issue is to have more middle-class to increase the needs for a certain quality service. We all know good service is more than just fulfilled the basic needs. To make it more clear, there has to be more people with middle class consuming capability. We are hitting a bottleneck. If it cannot be raised in a certain period, bad things could happen. Human society has its own way to force the rebalance. However, it's quite ugly. And I wish we can avoid this.
- slurry 13y ago
  Picture a herd of elephants crossing the savannah. Each elephant carries 50 monkeys on its back. A sudden mutation makes it so that each elephant can now only carry 30 monkeys, but also doubles the number of elephants in the herd. This is terrible news for two-fifths of the monkeys currently riding. Some may never be able to climb back up an elephant and a few unfortunates may find themselves trampled underfoot. On the other hand, the monkey-carrying capacity of the herd is now 20% greater than it was before. Assuming we can sort out the logistics properly, there is enough room for all current monkeys and their offspring, plus maybe a few monkeys from outside who hadn't had a chance to ride yet. KEY: Fewer monkeys per elephant = displaced jobs due to automation. More elephants in the herd = economic growth due to automation. Monkeys = workers. Elephants = "the economy" or "the means of production". People who tell you that automation is going to lead to long-term net job losses from are betting on something that has a very drastic job-displacement effect (WAY fewer monkeys per elephant) while having a very small effect on economic growth (few if any additional elephants). That doesn't make sense to me. The implausibly perfect technologies they tend to talk about would create a massive amount of new value in the economy, i.e. a great deal more elephants for us monkeys to ride on, even if only four abreast. It's much easier to predict the jobs that will be displaced than the new jobs that will be created, so it's cognitively simpler to take the pessimist's side.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's not implausible at all. The displacement effect is the fact that the skill and education bar keeps getting ratcheted higher, making it ever more difficult for people to crawl onto a new monkey. The growth-limiting effect is both intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic, because with depressed labor wages there is no internal demand for more growth, and extrinsic as you run up against natural resource and energy limits.[1] [1] I think the fact that oil is 4x more expensive than it was a decade ago is a dramatically under-appreciated reason for the tepid economic growth we have faced in that time.
  - svachalek 13y ago
    Consider instead the scenario where the elephants don't really enjoy how smelly and messy the monkeys are and replace them with nice clean robot monkeys, who actively discourage the bio monkeys from climbing back up. That's a lot of trampled monkeys. That's the "very drastic job-displacement effect". We're moving into a future where elephants just don't need monkeys anymore.
- a-priori 13y ago
  It's mostly speculation at this point what will happen to the labour economy over the next few decades. Certainly it has gone through upheavals in the past and yet there's still a demand for labour today. It's even possible that Jevrons' paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) may come into play, whereby increasing the efficiency with which we use labour will actually increase demand for it. I think that is at least a partial explanation for the labour boom of the industrial revolution. We could see a similar thing happen again. Or it could cause the value of labour to drop dramatically. But whichever happens I think basic income is worth exploring, because it offers other, immediate benefits: 1) It replaces the existing needs-based social assistance with something that's less intrusive and paternal, and that doesn't leave welfare traps: working more always means you take home more and do not risk what you currently have. 2) It adds financial security for the unemployed and students, which means that more people may pursue higher education and job training. That would help people adjust to a changing labour market. 3) It makes the labour market voluntary. In order for price discovery to work properly in a market, transactions must be voluntary for both parties. If the seller (i.e, the worker) cannot exit a market because they or their family will die or become homeless, then the price (i.e, the hourly wage) will be driven to zero. (Aside: The same logic applies to patient-pays private healthcare systems, except in this case the buyer cannot exit, which means that the price is driven to infinity. This may explain the insane cost of healthcare in the United States.) 4) Relatedly to point #3, basic income would remove the need for minimum wage laws. Currently, they're necessary because the value of unskilled labour may be less than the cost of living.
nickpinkston 13y ago
Fully with you - it would seem that the trifecta of a modern and most productive society is: - Education for all: To increase your productivity / fulfillment - Healthcare for all: To keep you productive / happy for as long as possible - Basic Income for all: To remove the risk that you can't earn your "living credits", thereby allowing greater risk taking and social beneficial / poorly compensated work to be paid (like volunteering, etc.)
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  You've just described Soviet Communism.
  - bcoates 13y ago
    Not without central planning and state ownership of enterprise he hasn't. What he's describing is just a somewhat 'Social' Liberalism.
    - chris_mahan 13y ago
      And how do you achieve education for all, healthcare for all, and basic income for all without central planning? And how do you achieve basic income for all without heavy regulation? Heavy regulation is the same as state ownership, except that the state then uses private investors as owners, but the owners don't get a say in the way the company is run (because of the heavy regulation).
      - bcoates 13y ago
        Taxes? There doesn't seem to be a very high correlation between how many of these social programs a country implements and how heavily the state involves itself in businesses. I'm not even arguing that these projects are good ideas, just that they're fundamentally from an entirely different political and economic philosophy than the actual system that existed in the Soviet Union.
  - wutbrodo 13y ago
andrewvc 13y ago
100% in favor of guaranteed minimum income. I think its doable. All the research seems to say that people make poor decisions when in dire straits. It seems like a great optimization.
- JamesArgo 13y ago
  I've never seen the numbers worked out. Also, you'd certainly need to adjust birthrate globally to keep ahead of Malthusian pressures. I'll remain sceptical until I see an actionable proposal. Have a link?
  - mberning 13y ago
    In Our Hands by Charles Murray
  - wutbrodo 13y ago
    There have been a few pilot programs in places like Namibia, India, etc. There's a couple of reasons to take early reports with a grain of salt: These programs are implemented with varying degrees of completeness (i.e. they're only regional, or they're only a partial basic income), and it's still early and on a relatively small scale. That being said, early reports have been extremely positive: Variously, crime rates have plummeted, education has risen sharply, child malnutrition has dropped, new startups have skyrocketed, community income has risen by a substantial amount more than the grant amount, etc. Given that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics understands that a basic income is at least _theoretically_ sound, the (few and flawed) data points that we have so far are slightly encouraging. EDIT for source link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implementation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implem...
DougN7 13y ago
It is distressing. I'm in favor of a living wage for everyone that works or is disabled/retired. What I can't decide on is what to do with those that will choose not to work. What if it was 1% of the population? Or 5%? Or...?
- Avshalom 13y ago
  Well seeing as the current unemployment is well over 5% I'm not sure that's a real issue.
  - strongvigilance 13y ago
    Indeed. In fact, when economists talk about full employment, they don't even mean 100% - it's thought that at least some unemployment is needed to control inflation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
- dnautics 13y ago
  how do you figure out who is choosing not to work, versus disabled? Who gets to choose this moral standard on behalf of the whole state?
scrabble 13y ago
Who pays for the basic income? What if working would provide you with a basic income? Would it then not make sense for people working poor jobs to quit and just get the guaranteed basic income along with all their free time?
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Shouldn't they?
  - scrabble 13y ago
    No. I mean, I would. But there still needs to be someone to work those jobs. Also, a lot of times people gain a sense of self-worth from doing work that is appreciated. Whether they are getting it or not, or whether it's right or not, I believe this continues to hold true.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      I think that if those jobs can't pay a worker enough to maintain that worker, they should end. Business models based on slavery/poverty should be deprecated.
- thedufer 13y ago
  In most proposals, basic income is covered by dropping the programs it replaces (social security, disability, etc.) and raising income taxes in all brackets. Basic income is something you get regardless of whether you work, so there is still incentive to work - if you want anything other than what basic income (which should cover little more than food + shelter in a relatively inexpensive area) can get you. Because this gives low-income people more power over their employers than before (they don't need to work), it probably allows you to repeal minimum wage laws, and let the wage fall somewhere reasonable.
  - prostoalex 13y ago
    > raising income taxes in all brackets With basic income you wouldn't have that many - motivation to work at the lower bracket would suddenly decrease.
kingmanaz 13y ago
A guaranteed minimum income may heighten the importance of citizenship. Rather than a state being little more than a place to make money for any and all that arrive within a state's borders - in other words, a global free market - the state's prosperity would be tied to an individual's well being through ties of relation. Proof of citizenship would be of paramount in a guaranteed minimum income scheme, and yet the concept of citizenship seems to have been discarded for the notion of global citizenship in recent decades. It will be interesting to see how a guaranteed basic income survives in the age of border-less states.
- dnautics 13y ago
  why should citizenship be important? Isn't this effectively nationalism, which is what drove WWI?
  - kingmanaz 13y ago
    Over six billion people inhabit earth, the majority of which do not live in a state with a guaranteed minimum income. An open border policy coupled with free money will likely lead to increased economic migration. A life boat is only so big.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Simply more proof that "global citizenship" is a elitist idea incompatible with the basic welfare of people.
  - clicks 13y ago
    I am an emigrant to the United States. I had to flee the place I'm from for political reasons (the place was unsafe for me and my family). But yet still I want the people of that place to do well... for two reasons I guess: 1) I just simply want everyone on this earth to do well, no matter what country they're citizens to and 2) because the people I left behind, a lot of them were family, friends. I knew them well, I still keep in touch with them. They're still among my closest friends. I want them to live the remainder of their lives peacefully, happily, prosperously. I know that you've got a somewhat similar background story as me... you/your family left Bangladesh for a better life. You were lucky in that you were privileged enough to have the means to get out of that place -- you know that a good half of the country did not. So, what about the people still there... surely you care a non-zero amount for their welfare. Right? We live in an interconnected world. Our actions, business decisions, political decisions have an effect on the entire world -- sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't. An argument could be made that there are people out there in the world who are not doing well because of something that our country did. Right now you have Obama on a tour trying to drum up support for a war. His main reasoning is that America is the police of the world... 400 children were supposedly gassed, and so we have to step in to stop this injustice. There are injustices of different kinds being perpetrated in other countries... what makes them so different from Syria, that they don't deserve our help? I can understand prioritizing ... first comes the welfare of our own American citizens, and then the rest of the world... but completely ignoring the other world seems like a cruel and selfish thing to do. How is this not obvious?
StandardFuture 13y ago
You say that you have seen very little on this subject yet somehow you are able to judge what is a step in the right direction? What is baffling is how many HNers who are apparently eager to downvote anyone in disagreement with the basic income argument and ask for counter-arguments yet fail to prove it in details (or even links) that the idea will work.
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  I think this stems from the fact that basic income is theoretically sound to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of economics. Now of course, it's DEFINITELY dangerous to assume that "theory supports it" is a slam-dunk case for anything, but preliminary results with pilot programs have also been encouraging[1] (the results have been fantastic, but the reliability of the data is not completely sound given how limited the programs are and how early it is). Between the fact that theory supports basic income and preliminary pilot programs provide (on-balance) cause for cautious optimism, it seems that the burden of counter-proof is squarely on the side of those saying "Of course it could never work", particularly since I personally have never seen an HN comment providing anything to back that up beyond "It's just obvious, can't you see". I haven't seen any data OR plausible theoretical explanation provided as a counter to basic income. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implementation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implem...
  - StandardFuture 13y ago
    Ah! A Link! Well after some review of the information on that Wikipedia article it is clear that all income pilot programs have only been administered to a minor degree in third world countries. The ideas of administering this system on a LARGE SCALE in a 'well-developed' country such as the US would probably bring many of the problems Friedrich Hayek theorizes it would. From Wikipedia: "It is obvious that for a long time to come it will be wholly impossible to secure an adequate and uniform minimum standard for all human beings everywhere, or at least that the wealthier countries would not be content to secure for their citizens no higher standards than can be secured for all men. But to confine to the citizens of particular countries provisions for a minimum standard higher than that universally applied makes it a privilege and necessitates certain limitations on the free movement of men across frontiers... we must face the fact that we here encounter a limit to the universal application of those liberal principles of policy which the existing facts of the present world make unavoidable." In other words people would flock from all over the world in DROVES to secure a spot in the unconditional free money system.

ahoy 13y ago

I like the universal basic income idea too, but haven't we gone through a similar crisis during the industrial revolution? How did we pull out of that? This is a genuine question, I'm a poor student of history.

mberning 13y ago
I think that the general consensus is that the industrial revolution did end up replacing many of the jobs that it eliminated, and then some, it just took time. This new revolution in automation may do the same, or it may not. I like to look at the very real possibility of self driving cars and trucks. How many truck drivers are employed today? They will be made obsolete very quickly once self driving trucks hit the market. Where are they going to turn for work? Are they going to suddenly become a programmer, writer, graphic designer, etc? I don't think so. Manual labor jobs were much more interchangeable than labors of the mind.
marcosdumay 13y ago
We let people get hungry, and die of overworking. The survirvours inherited a more productive society.
- Radim 13y ago
  Actually, it brought unprecedented power to the workers, balancing the power between employer/employee significantly. It certainly was a tough period (hardly alone in that respect!), but the romanticised images of starving children chained by ankles in sweltering mines, whereas they had happily capered about their sunny villages all day long prior to the revolution, are way off [0]. [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/why-workers-welcomed-long-hours-of-industrial-revolution.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/why-workers-welcome...
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    If you restrict your survey of the condition of the working class to those who have published autobiographies and memoirs, you will have a distorted view of the condition of most workers during the period.
    - Radim 13y ago
      If you're referring to the linked article: it's true I haven't read her books, but I hope that a leading UK scholarly expert on the industrial revolution would have taken your point into account!
rayiner 13y ago
It's not clear that we ever did pull out of it. A certain small class of people who couldn't move away from agriculture, say Native Americans who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyles, suffered tremendously as the country industrialized and the valuable land was taken over for industrial agriculture. They have never recovered, and are the poorest people in the U.S. to this day. What this means is that people need to move to whatever is next, and those who don't, or more importantly can't, will be left behind. But what's next? During the industrial revolution, people moved to cities to go work in factories. But what's the way forward today? Arguably the key difference between today and back then is that the industrial revolution caused a change in where labor was demanded, while the automation revolution reduces the need for labor across almost all sectors of the economy. Yes, some people need to program the machines, but not that many. After all, during the industrial revolution it wasn't mechanical engineering that offered job opportunities for the masses. To me, the obvious "what's next" is this: those whose jobs are obsoleted by automation personally service those whose jobs aren't. It's possible that the future of America is 2/3 of the population acting as nannies, personal assistants, etc, to the 1/3 whose jobs haven't been automated. I bet there are a ton of people even now who would cook/clean/etc for $5/hour + board. You'd already see this in the U.S. if it wasn't for the minimum wage/welfare. What happens when automation drives the price of unskilled labor down to $2-3/hour? The U.S. becomes Bangladesh is what happens. I think it's a social disaster in the making, but I struggle to think of alternatives.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  Essentially, this is the road back to serfdom. The key difference being that Medieval serfs worked land on behalf of landowners, whereas in this scenario, they simply provide services. I agree that it's a social disaster in the making, but I suspect it's a real possibility.
- LiweiZ 13y ago
  I believe the key to this issue is to have more middle-class to increase the needs for a certain quality service. We all know good service is more than just fulfilled the basic needs. To make it more clear, there has to be more people with middle class consuming capability. We are hitting a bottleneck. If it cannot be raised in a certain period, bad things could happen. Human society has its own way to force the rebalance. However, it's quite ugly. And I wish we can avoid this.
slurry 13y ago
Picture a herd of elephants crossing the savannah. Each elephant carries 50 monkeys on its back. A sudden mutation makes it so that each elephant can now only carry 30 monkeys, but also doubles the number of elephants in the herd. This is terrible news for two-fifths of the monkeys currently riding. Some may never be able to climb back up an elephant and a few unfortunates may find themselves trampled underfoot. On the other hand, the monkey-carrying capacity of the herd is now 20% greater than it was before. Assuming we can sort out the logistics properly, there is enough room for all current monkeys and their offspring, plus maybe a few monkeys from outside who hadn't had a chance to ride yet. KEY: Fewer monkeys per elephant = displaced jobs due to automation. More elephants in the herd = economic growth due to automation. Monkeys = workers. Elephants = "the economy" or "the means of production". People who tell you that automation is going to lead to long-term net job losses from are betting on something that has a very drastic job-displacement effect (WAY fewer monkeys per elephant) while having a very small effect on economic growth (few if any additional elephants). That doesn't make sense to me. The implausibly perfect technologies they tend to talk about would create a massive amount of new value in the economy, i.e. a great deal more elephants for us monkeys to ride on, even if only four abreast. It's much easier to predict the jobs that will be displaced than the new jobs that will be created, so it's cognitively simpler to take the pessimist's side.
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's not implausible at all. The displacement effect is the fact that the skill and education bar keeps getting ratcheted higher, making it ever more difficult for people to crawl onto a new monkey. The growth-limiting effect is both intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic, because with depressed labor wages there is no internal demand for more growth, and extrinsic as you run up against natural resource and energy limits.[1] [1] I think the fact that oil is 4x more expensive than it was a decade ago is a dramatically under-appreciated reason for the tepid economic growth we have faced in that time.
- svachalek 13y ago
  Consider instead the scenario where the elephants don't really enjoy how smelly and messy the monkeys are and replace them with nice clean robot monkeys, who actively discourage the bio monkeys from climbing back up. That's a lot of trampled monkeys. That's the "very drastic job-displacement effect". We're moving into a future where elephants just don't need monkeys anymore.
a-priori 13y ago
It's mostly speculation at this point what will happen to the labour economy over the next few decades. Certainly it has gone through upheavals in the past and yet there's still a demand for labour today. It's even possible that Jevrons' paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) may come into play, whereby increasing the efficiency with which we use labour will actually increase demand for it. I think that is at least a partial explanation for the labour boom of the industrial revolution. We could see a similar thing happen again. Or it could cause the value of labour to drop dramatically. But whichever happens I think basic income is worth exploring, because it offers other, immediate benefits: 1) It replaces the existing needs-based social assistance with something that's less intrusive and paternal, and that doesn't leave welfare traps: working more always means you take home more and do not risk what you currently have. 2) It adds financial security for the unemployed and students, which means that more people may pursue higher education and job training. That would help people adjust to a changing labour market. 3) It makes the labour market voluntary. In order for price discovery to work properly in a market, transactions must be voluntary for both parties. If the seller (i.e, the worker) cannot exit a market because they or their family will die or become homeless, then the price (i.e, the hourly wage) will be driven to zero. (Aside: The same logic applies to patient-pays private healthcare systems, except in this case the buyer cannot exit, which means that the price is driven to infinity. This may explain the insane cost of healthcare in the United States.) 4) Relatedly to point #3, basic income would remove the need for minimum wage laws. Currently, they're necessary because the value of unskilled labour may be less than the cost of living.

nickpinkston 13y ago

Fully with you - it would seem that the trifecta of a modern and most productive society is: - Education for all: To increase your productivity / fulfillment - Healthcare for all: To keep you productive / happy for as long as possible - Basic Income for all: To remove the risk that you can't earn your "living credits", thereby allowing greater risk taking and social beneficial / poorly compensated work to be paid (like volunteering, etc.)

chris_mahan 13y ago
You've just described Soviet Communism.
- bcoates 13y ago
  Not without central planning and state ownership of enterprise he hasn't. What he's describing is just a somewhat 'Social' Liberalism.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    And how do you achieve education for all, healthcare for all, and basic income for all without central planning? And how do you achieve basic income for all without heavy regulation? Heavy regulation is the same as state ownership, except that the state then uses private investors as owners, but the owners don't get a say in the way the company is run (because of the heavy regulation).
    - bcoates 13y ago
      Taxes? There doesn't seem to be a very high correlation between how many of these social programs a country implements and how heavily the state involves itself in businesses. I'm not even arguing that these projects are good ideas, just that they're fundamentally from an entirely different political and economic philosophy than the actual system that existed in the Soviet Union.
- wutbrodo 13y ago

andrewvc 13y ago

100% in favor of guaranteed minimum income. I think its doable. All the research seems to say that people make poor decisions when in dire straits. It seems like a great optimization.

JamesArgo 13y ago
I've never seen the numbers worked out. Also, you'd certainly need to adjust birthrate globally to keep ahead of Malthusian pressures. I'll remain sceptical until I see an actionable proposal. Have a link?
- mberning 13y ago
  In Our Hands by Charles Murray
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  There have been a few pilot programs in places like Namibia, India, etc. There's a couple of reasons to take early reports with a grain of salt: These programs are implemented with varying degrees of completeness (i.e. they're only regional, or they're only a partial basic income), and it's still early and on a relatively small scale. That being said, early reports have been extremely positive: Variously, crime rates have plummeted, education has risen sharply, child malnutrition has dropped, new startups have skyrocketed, community income has risen by a substantial amount more than the grant amount, etc. Given that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics understands that a basic income is at least _theoretically_ sound, the (few and flawed) data points that we have so far are slightly encouraging. EDIT for source link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implementation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implem...

DougN7 13y ago

It is distressing. I'm in favor of a living wage for everyone that works or is disabled/retired. What I can't decide on is what to do with those that will choose not to work. What if it was 1% of the population? Or 5%? Or...?

Avshalom 13y ago
Well seeing as the current unemployment is well over 5% I'm not sure that's a real issue.
- strongvigilance 13y ago
  Indeed. In fact, when economists talk about full employment, they don't even mean 100% - it's thought that at least some unemployment is needed to control inflation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
dnautics 13y ago
how do you figure out who is choosing not to work, versus disabled? Who gets to choose this moral standard on behalf of the whole state?

scrabble 13y ago

Who pays for the basic income? What if working would provide you with a basic income? Would it then not make sense for people working poor jobs to quit and just get the guaranteed basic income along with all their free time?

pessimizer 13y ago
Shouldn't they?
- scrabble 13y ago
  No. I mean, I would. But there still needs to be someone to work those jobs. Also, a lot of times people gain a sense of self-worth from doing work that is appreciated. Whether they are getting it or not, or whether it's right or not, I believe this continues to hold true.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    I think that if those jobs can't pay a worker enough to maintain that worker, they should end. Business models based on slavery/poverty should be deprecated.
thedufer 13y ago
In most proposals, basic income is covered by dropping the programs it replaces (social security, disability, etc.) and raising income taxes in all brackets. Basic income is something you get regardless of whether you work, so there is still incentive to work - if you want anything other than what basic income (which should cover little more than food + shelter in a relatively inexpensive area) can get you. Because this gives low-income people more power over their employers than before (they don't need to work), it probably allows you to repeal minimum wage laws, and let the wage fall somewhere reasonable.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  > raising income taxes in all brackets With basic income you wouldn't have that many - motivation to work at the lower bracket would suddenly decrease.

kingmanaz 13y ago

A guaranteed minimum income may heighten the importance of citizenship. Rather than a state being little more than a place to make money for any and all that arrive within a state's borders - in other words, a global free market - the state's prosperity would be tied to an individual's well being through ties of relation. Proof of citizenship would be of paramount in a guaranteed minimum income scheme, and yet the concept of citizenship seems to have been discarded for the notion of global citizenship in recent decades. It will be interesting to see how a guaranteed basic income survives in the age of border-less states.

dnautics 13y ago
why should citizenship be important? Isn't this effectively nationalism, which is what drove WWI?
- kingmanaz 13y ago
  Over six billion people inhabit earth, the majority of which do not live in a state with a guaranteed minimum income. An open border policy coupled with free money will likely lead to increased economic migration. A life boat is only so big.
rayiner 13y ago
Simply more proof that "global citizenship" is a elitist idea incompatible with the basic welfare of people.
- clicks 13y ago
  I am an emigrant to the United States. I had to flee the place I'm from for political reasons (the place was unsafe for me and my family). But yet still I want the people of that place to do well... for two reasons I guess: 1) I just simply want everyone on this earth to do well, no matter what country they're citizens to and 2) because the people I left behind, a lot of them were family, friends. I knew them well, I still keep in touch with them. They're still among my closest friends. I want them to live the remainder of their lives peacefully, happily, prosperously. I know that you've got a somewhat similar background story as me... you/your family left Bangladesh for a better life. You were lucky in that you were privileged enough to have the means to get out of that place -- you know that a good half of the country did not. So, what about the people still there... surely you care a non-zero amount for their welfare. Right? We live in an interconnected world. Our actions, business decisions, political decisions have an effect on the entire world -- sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't. An argument could be made that there are people out there in the world who are not doing well because of something that our country did. Right now you have Obama on a tour trying to drum up support for a war. His main reasoning is that America is the police of the world... 400 children were supposedly gassed, and so we have to step in to stop this injustice. There are injustices of different kinds being perpetrated in other countries... what makes them so different from Syria, that they don't deserve our help? I can understand prioritizing ... first comes the welfare of our own American citizens, and then the rest of the world... but completely ignoring the other world seems like a cruel and selfish thing to do. How is this not obvious?

StandardFuture 13y ago

You say that you have seen very little on this subject yet somehow you are able to judge what is a step in the right direction? What is baffling is how many HNers who are apparently eager to downvote anyone in disagreement with the basic income argument and ask for counter-arguments yet fail to prove it in details (or even links) that the idea will work.

wutbrodo 13y ago
I think this stems from the fact that basic income is theoretically sound to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of economics. Now of course, it's DEFINITELY dangerous to assume that "theory supports it" is a slam-dunk case for anything, but preliminary results with pilot programs have also been encouraging[1] (the results have been fantastic, but the reliability of the data is not completely sound given how limited the programs are and how early it is). Between the fact that theory supports basic income and preliminary pilot programs provide (on-balance) cause for cautious optimism, it seems that the burden of counter-proof is squarely on the side of those saying "Of course it could never work", particularly since I personally have never seen an HN comment providing anything to back that up beyond "It's just obvious, can't you see". I haven't seen any data OR plausible theoretical explanation provided as a counter to basic income. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implementation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_implem...
- StandardFuture 13y ago
  Ah! A Link! Well after some review of the information on that Wikipedia article it is clear that all income pilot programs have only been administered to a minor degree in third world countries. The ideas of administering this system on a LARGE SCALE in a 'well-developed' country such as the US would probably bring many of the problems Friedrich Hayek theorizes it would. From Wikipedia: "It is obvious that for a long time to come it will be wholly impossible to secure an adequate and uniform minimum standard for all human beings everywhere, or at least that the wealthier countries would not be content to secure for their citizens no higher standards than can be secured for all men. But to confine to the citizens of particular countries provisions for a minimum standard higher than that universally applied makes it a privilege and necessitates certain limitations on the free movement of men across frontiers... we must face the fact that we here encounter a limit to the universal application of those liberal principles of policy which the existing facts of the present world make unavoidable." In other words people would flock from all over the world in DROVES to secure a spot in the unconditional free money system.