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I think the whole discussion boils down to this: An additional cost is the incentive or disincentive for engaging in productive work created by the Basic Incom

• terhechte 13y ago
  Certainly true, though it would be interesting to simply model both cases and see how much the results deviate from each other.
• AndrewDucker 13y ago
  Absolutely. _My_ feeling is that people would always like a little bit more money. Basic income removes the "cliff" effect, whereby earning more money can actually reduce your income. Therefore people will work more. After all, if you could go out and work for five hours next week, and be guaranteed that those five hours would give you the cash to buy something you have your eye on, then why wouldn't you?
  • zoul 13y ago
    Agreed. But would those “five hours of work” be enough for the whole economy to stay afloat and pay the basic income?
    • AndrewDucker 13y ago
      Not by itself. The question is - once you start accumulating, how much will people prioritise "getting more stuff" over "playing computer games all day"? I mean, I earn about $60k. I'm not about to drop down to a $10k income, even if I could get that without any effort. And I think most people are like that - a big reason, as far as I can tell, that many people who could work, don't is that they would lose money by doing so, at least to start with, and they're terrified to take that risk. Let's say you're unemployed now - someone asks you to help them wash windows for a few hours next week. Doing so would jeopardise your benefits, and possibly leave you homeless if you were found out. If you could take that bit of work, you'd probably find the number of hours going up (if you were any good at it) and possibly leading into more, better, work. But if we stop people even taking that first step, we effectively shut them out of the job market. (I'm sure there would be _some_ people that decided to play games all day. But I'm fairly sure the free riders would be a tiny part of the population. People like stuff too much for that.)
      • ctdonath 13y ago
        I'm fairly sure the free riders would be a tiny part of the population. I don't. And that's the problem with the whole discussion: a simple, critical tipping point makes or breaks the whole proposition, and nobody can sufficiently prove which way it will tip to the satisfaction & persuasion of the sociopolitical opposition. Doesn't help that the proposition, hinging on this vapid presumption (either way), involves ENORMOUS amounts of money: "oops, we were wrong, too many people became free riders" would prove disastrous. Humans have tried a lot of socioeconomic structures, and a "play if you want to" BI model hasn't taken hold.
        • AndrewDucker 13y ago
          There have already been experiments, like this one: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 "Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families. The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did." Which isn't at all conclusive. One town, in one culture, does not mean very much in the long term. But it's enough for me to think that more experimentation is worthwhile.
          • ctdonath 13y ago
            Hence the normalization of "one income families" where mothers could stay home with babies and kids could focus on school. Now taxation has grown enough to create great pressure for both parents to work, with consequences leading to calls for "mincome" precisely so pressures to earn can be relieved - without realizing that relentless demands for government spending (ever demanding more revenue from taxpayers) will just exhaust that source as well and result in even more cries for financial assistance. Cut government spending, stop demanding ever more revenue from citizens.
    • throwaway0094 13y ago
      Those five hours are an outlier.
  • sillysaurus2 13y ago
    It also seems like people are overlooking an important fact: people find ambition attractive. So anyone without any ambition in life other than to collect a basic income while playing games may find themselves shunned by their preferred sex. If you want to date, then you'll probably want a job. And almost everybody wants to date (or at least to mate). Therefore there may be no basis for being afraid that basic income will reduce people's desire to go work.
    • yummyfajitas 13y ago
      Write some code and see if altering that assumption changes the result. Here is the code. You are interested in line 17. https://gist.github.com/stucchio/7447067 https://gist.github.com/stucchio/7447067
      • sillysaurus2 13y ago
        EDIT: Anaconda worked, thanks. Experimenting with the code now.
        • ivoflipse 13y ago
          My suggestions would be to try running Canopy (Enthought) or Anaconda (Continuum), which come with all 'scientific' batteries included and make scientific libraries easier to install and to keep them up to date.
        • Thrymr 13y ago
          Your scipy install is broken, it has nothing to do with his code. If you can't successfully run: from scipy.stats import * then it's not going to work. Try installing a scientific python distribution like Enthought Canopy or Anaconda. On Unix systems it's possible to build it yourself, but on Windows unless you have the right compiler licenses and enjoy pain, you probably don't want to do that.
    • gaius 13y ago
      Nice theory, but demographics don't support that hypothesis.
  • shawabawa3 13y ago
    The other thing the article ignores completely is the less extreme version of the "jk rowling effect". Where's the cost benefit from all the new startups and small businesses that people doing min-wage jobs or basic jobs wouldn't have the time or want to take the risk to do?
    • DanielStraight 13y ago
      Indeed. I think this is huge. To me, this is one of the most attractive things about basic income. Someone receiving basic income (and protected by universal health care) can effectively do whatever they want. That includes playing video games all day, but it also includes working full-time on something interesting to them. Maybe it will be profitable, maybe it'll simply make them a more interesting (and maybe even more employable) person. A basic job tends to discourage mobility in all the ways a normal job does. A basic income encourages mobility because you have time to do anything... including invent something or go back to school (or use online courses) to learn a totally new field. Or even just take a break to recharge. I'd love to model this, but I have no clue how. Perhaps a normal distribution of a change in a person's ability to produce value when taking basic income and not working. Some people will drastically decrease their ability to produce value, some people will drastically increase it. Most, I suspect, will somewhat increase it and then get back to work.
    • tptacek 13y ago
      So put numbers to it. Come up with upper and lower bounds for the effect and add them to the model, then post your code, the result, and the rationale behind the numbers. The article didn't "ignore this completely". It set up a framework within which you can easily express that argument. Go do it.
      • shawabawa3 13y ago
        What numbers? There's absolutely no data to support any numbers for this, how could I possibly guess? That's why I don't like this post. It would have been really interesting if there had been any basis at all for the numbers, but a model for something this complicated backed by nothing is worse than useless - it's misleading.
  • anonymous 13y ago
    My opinion is that we're not sure how the social dynamics will change with a guaranteed basic income, so making predictions like this is not really constructive. I favour the experimental approach - roll it out and then follow through with surveys to see its impact. Maybe try it out in only one or two states at first, if possible ones with a good mix of people with various incomes and ethnicities.
    • AndrewDucker 13y ago
      Oh yes, it needs to be tried out. But there have already been experiments, like this one: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 "Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families. The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did."
  • shawn-furyan 13y ago
    I changed the non_worker_multiplier from a uniform distribution from -0.05 to 0.15 to a much more optimistic uniform distribution of 0.5 to 1.0. The predicted outcomes still greatly favor Basic Job to the tune of ~1.5T. I think that this demonstrates to a large degree the author's point that the best way to disagree is to make a change and see what you come up with. For someone with inclinations similar to yours, your comment is likely enough for them to justify dismissing the result reached by the basic model, but when you add the proposed effect to the model, well, you come to the same basic conclusion, that Basic Income is significantly more expensive than Basic Job. A lot of comments here, including yours, come from an unjustified implicit rejection of the main thesis of the article by preferring rhetoric over model refinement. That is, the author is arguing that a better way to go about this discourse is to test the effects of different assumptions with the model, but many commenters are hammering through rhetorical rebuttals to the model's conclusion without addressing whether they actually believe that rhetoric is more effective than the mode of discourse proposed by the author. Your rhetorical argument (including the argument of the grandparent since you apparently concurred: "absolutely") suggests that the main factor in deciding between the two approaches is whether they decrease or increase work productivity. When that hypothesis is tested in the model, it turns out that the other factors combined overwhelm the effect on worker productivity, and so the effect on worker productivity should not dominate the debate as suggested by the grandparent. This was an easily testable hypothesis given the model offered, and once it was tested it looked weaker than suggested by the grandparent. I think that this demonstrates that there is some truth to the author's claim that running our assumptions through the model, and refining it overtime is likely more valuable than making these untested rhetorical arguments. Now, certainly there are likely problems elsewhere in the model, and reasonable people can have disagreements on what assumptions are reasonable. But the point is to argue and test those assumptions continually, rather than offering unweighted rhetorical arguments and either never reaching consensus, or just landing on the argument that is most repeated or shouted the most loudly.
    • AndrewDucker 13y ago
      Except that I _also_ don't believe that it's as simple as that - because we're talking about complex societal changes. If you _give_ everyone a job, then what are they doing? How does that compete with people already in minimum wage jobs? Are we offering, effectively, subsidised labour for large corporations? How does that effect people already in those jobs, or people who would be moving into those jobs? I don't believe that any model could be made which would take all of the factors into consideration - I believe that we will need to _do_ it (in one city, or one state, or one nation) and then see what the results are.
• yummyfajitas 13y ago
  The model doesn't tell you this parameter. All it does is takes such a parameter as an input and tells you the cost of the policy. Note that I changed the plausibility range of this parameter quite a bit in the "How to Disagree" section, it didn't alter the outcome much.
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  Actually, there have been studies done of the marginal utility of additional marginal income and it's incentive effects at different income levels (I've seen several over the years). If you do a thorough review of those studies and the actual numbers from real existing income distributions and benefit programs that would be replaced by BI, it's quite plausible that you could come up with something grounded in a justifiable model that could answer that question rather than just an out-of-nothing assumption.