11 ms·

The money for basic income must come from somewhere, right? I can think of two choices: 1. Creating money from air, thus driving price inflation. 2. Redist

• jacalata 13y ago
  Where do open source programs come from if nobody is paid for them?
  • kaoD 13y ago
    Altruism? Many open source projects have paid contributors anyways.
    • jacalata 13y ago
      Yes, among other reasons such as solving a problem for themselves or enjoyment of the process. The point is that financial motivation doesn't even explain all the production in the economy right now, so obviously removing the financial motive won't remove all production. And a basic income doesn't imply no financial motivation anyway, how many investment bankers and programmers quit their job yesterday because they already have enough savings to eat and live in a crappy sharehouse for the rest of their lives?
  • wyager 13y ago
    Making open source projects is fun. Flipping burgers and cleaning toilets isn't. And believe it or not, people do pay for open-source programs. It's just not necessarily the end user.
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      People clean toilets without being paid... just not typically other people's toilets.
  • sliverstorm 13y ago
    Have you ever looked at the breakdown of who writes the Linux kernel? It's mostly maintained by corporations, notably companies like Red Hat and strangely enough even Microsoft.
• kiba 13y ago
  And sociologically... how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? Where does wealth come from if nobody works? Robots, and higher wages for those who works.
  • wyager 13y ago
    Because taxing high earners will magically make the necessary technology appear.
    • cookingrobot 13y ago
      The magic middle step is that the job market would decide that crappy jobs need to pay a lot more. This would make it reasonable to invest in robots where it doesn't make sense today. One we make a few decades of progress on that front, I would expect the robots get so cheap that it's overall more efficient than we are today. In other words it would be the kick we need to get out of this local maxima of enjoying the benefits of cheap labor, and would end at a much better/more efficient/less abusive system.
• joelrunyon 13y ago
  > how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? What if your work didn't have to suck? What if you could actually work, create something useful and enjoy it? I don't understand why people think this is such an impossible concept.
  • hobs 13y ago
    Its not an impossible concept, but most people's workplaces suck to varying degrees. Unless you are a highly valued "knowledge worker" you will find that you life has a large component of drudgery.
    • gruseom 13y ago
      To me that is an argument in favor of basic income: it would force workplaces to suck less, since they'd have competition at the bottom end.
  • kaoD 13y ago
    Most people would rather work in whatever they want than working for a wage for someone else's benefit. Even if they find their job rewarding, being told what and when to do something is not as rewarding as... not being. Also: what about highly unrewarding jobs?
    • hedning 13y ago
      Well, if no one would work the unrewarding jobs, and they were needed. The wages for these jobs would go up. As Bertrand Russell said there's two types of jobs. "The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid". Reversing this might not be the worst thing in the world.
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        And/or they'll be automated (or at least sufficiently automated).
    • 13y ago
• Retric 13y ago
  The incentives for wealth redistribution are vary simple. You hand over a fixed percentage of money to the poor and they don't steal from you or end up in prison. The idea being while many poor people will not steal the overhead from those that do is high enough that it's worth a lot. As to basic income vs. other forms of welfare it's more money directly but far lower overhead. Which means people that are capable of finding productive jobs are adding to the economy vs. varying unemployment information etc. On top of that some people will simply take more risks which has a huge upside vs. unemployment where you can't get the money if your starting up your working for your self so people watch TV vs building an App. Socially, money is a huge motivator. Most collage educated people could get by working 1/2 what they do but the 20 hour work week or taking 6 months off a year did not take off instead people buy 5$ coffee at Starbucks etc. PS: And yes the poor can be a lot more disruptive than you might think just look at say the french revolution or any of the communist revolutions.
  • jswinghammer 13y ago
    That's basically all nonsense. If I have money and really feel like the poor are going to take it then I can buy security or just move far out into the country. Rich people were far less secretive in the past than they are now (for a variety of reasons). If a basic income means that I can support myself without work and have a decent living then I'm probably not working-it's pretty simple. I suspect you'd have fewer apps being built, manual labor getting done, tough problems getting solved, etc. And if I can't then why are we bothering again? The communist revolutions of the past tended to be largely nationalist in their roots. The poor ended up being terribly harmed by those revolutions (as did many other people I suppose).
    • capisce 13y ago
      Money is not a powerful motivator when it comes to innovation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Abo... Money is still a motivator when it comes to getting unrewarding work done, but basic income incentivizes work in a way that a welfare that only gets paid when you're unemployed does not.
• jswinghammer 13y ago
  1. would probably work better in a basic income world because in theory the resulting boom and bust cycle would cause less distress because people would have something more to fall back on. Eventually this has to end but in the long run we'll all be dead anyway. 2. is unlikely because no one wants to pay for anything. This whole idea is a very naive scheme to try to solve the obvious problem with welfare that there are large groups of productive people who pay for those who are not. It creates a great deal of anger in the productive group so if you can mitigate that anger then maybe you can continue your welfare schemes. I'm going to guess that this basic income would not entirely replace welfare programs. I find it so interesting that there are so many things being proposed by people entirely ignorant of political economy and contradictory to the most basic understanding of the profession. Between this and this recent minimum wage increase nonsense it seems like we're hell bent on just saying "To hell with what econ 101 says, this sounds good to me!" I keep hoping that the adults show up and just start ignoring all this and letting everyone know they're being ignored. I suspect that will not happen in this case. It never has before.
  • thenmar 13y ago
    Really? Do you really think everyone on welfare, or even a majority, are just lazy poor people living off the money earned by the glorious, noble, hard-working, libertarian class? Is it really that simple?
    • jswinghammer 13y ago
      Of course not. They're just people responding to incentives to make the best choices they can. I don't judge anyone on welfare or not.
      • thenmar 13y ago
        I think this "poor people are dumb animals and if we stopped giving the money they'd go get jobs" attitude is super fucked up.
    • baddox 13y ago
• jmillikin 13y ago
  Top earners have a strong vested interest in the lowest possible income not being too low, because starving homeless masses have a negative impact on property values. The question is not whether to redistribute income, but how much and by which mechanism. Inflation is income redistribution also, remember. The traditional income redistribution systems in the US are social security (from the young to the old), welfare (from the employed to the unemployed), and medicare (from the healthy to the unhealthy). The cost of these systems is $X + $Y + $Z. Costs are inflated by large bureaucracies put in place to enforce social mores as punitive measures against the poor ("piss in this cup or you don't get EBT this month"; "EBT is for buying cheez-puffs, not condoms"). If giving $X + $Y + $Z to everyone in the US would provide them with a better quality of life, then it makes sense to do that instead of managing separate programs. Two significant additional benefits to a basic income are: 1. It fixes the problem of going from unemployed to employed-at-minimum-wage resulting in a net decrease in household income. It's a simple observation that punishing people for getting a job will decrease the total number of employed adults. 2. It enables the minimum wage to be much lower than the poverty line. The nation has collectively decided that an adult working full time should be entitled to to the basic necessities of life, and the cost of that decision is that jobs which are worth less than $7.25 simply aren't offered (or are only offered illegally). If everyone already makes enough to get by, then there's far fewer ethical problems with paying someone $3 an hour to sweep some floors or pick up garbage from a sidewalk.
  • jswinghammer 13y ago
    Inflation is a redistribution scheme of the poor to the rich and from savings to spenders. Life becomes a lot simpler when we just eliminate all these schemes and just let people solve problems for themselves. This expectation that you can disrupt the economy in a major way and have the rest of the society stay static around me is a very serious reasoning error.
    • jmillikin 13y ago
      > Inflation is a redistribution scheme of the poor to the > rich and from savings to spenders. Technically, from those with monetary savings to those with non-monetary savings. Inflation will strike someone with $1,000,000 in the bank much harder than someone with a stash of precious metal, large property holdings, or industrial equipment. The hardest hit are individuals who have accumulated wealth but are not skilled enough at managing it (e.g. retirees living on an immediate annuity). Inflation doesn't have much effect on the poor, because income tends to increase along with the cost of consumer goods.
• psbp 13y ago
  Read this article instead: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/rethinking-the-idea-of-a-basic-income-for-all/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/rethinking-the-... The idea is to remove the current welfare system and replace it with basic income.
  • xname 13y ago
    No. It is impossible. What will happen is add basic income on top of current welfare system. Read: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-some-of-the-biggest-problems-with-a-guaranteed-annual-income.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
• sliverstorm 13y ago
  The money for basic income must come from somewhere, right? Most people I've talked to about BI begin and end that part of the discussion with something that boils down to "somewhere, but not me"
• dllthomas 13y ago
  Peg the BI amount to targeted inflation, not to actual (or projected) inflation. If fewer people are interested in working, labor commands more value, and work becomes more desirable. There is no race to the bottom; it's self correcting, not a downward spiral.
• legutierr 13y ago
  > Where does wealth come from if nobody works? If you didn't have to work for money, what would you do? Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you take your parents out of the nursing home and care for them yourself? Would you spend more time with your signifiant other? Would you return to music or painting, which you abandoned when you had to enter the "real world" and earn a living? Would you go back to school, to pursue the academic interests you earlier had to set aside to focus on something that had good job prospects? Would you volunteer more often, or get politically involved trying to fix issues you don't have time to worry about right now? Would you exercise more, and play sports more often? Would you spend more time cooking, and cut back on prepared, unhealthy foods? Would you sleep seven hours a day, instead of five? Would you quit your job and start the company that you always wanted to, and steer it in the direction you wanted, working with the people that you wanted to, without thinking twice about what potential investors might think? Would you move into the career that you always dreamed of as a kid, but that just didn't pay enough? Would you take more risks? Would you worry less about failure, and work harder on those things that you are passionate about? Or would you just laze around on the couch in your cramped apartment watching TV and eating ice-cream all day? Of course, it must be this last option, because what else would anyone ever do if they had the choice not to work? Of course, without the fear of abject deprivation as a motivator, no one would ever do any work, and no one ever has.
  • thisosound 13y ago
    You underestimate how lazy humans get if they don't have discipline and/or pressure.
    • icelancer 13y ago
      For a given number of them, yes. Who cares?
    • reginaldjcooper 13y ago
      Those people are already not working. So, instead of spending more on officials and offices and paperwork determining if they can have welfare or not, let's just give them the money directly.
• rayiner 13y ago
  There's an interesting conceptual tension in your post: High performers like to believe that they're entitled to the vast majority of the country's income because they're responsible for the vast majority of the wealth creation. Thus they see high taxes as "punishment" for success. But if that's true, why does it matter if say the bottom 40% of income earners just stop working. They account for only about 10% of the nations income, and presumably if the market compensates people fairly production would decrease by only 10% or less if these people stopped working.
  • eropple 13y ago
    Also related to the hilarity of "going Galt". Nice post.
  • reginaldjcooper 13y ago
    Incredible post.
  • jotm 13y ago
    Bottom 40% are responsible for maintenance - without them there can be no production (i.e. they're vital). It's not easy to write code or work on 3D printers when your toilet is clogged and there are no people unloading trucks at the local stores :-)
• pkulak 13y ago
  > how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? Where does wealth come from if nobody works? Work still needs to be done. BI means that you can get rid of the minimum wage and labor becomes worth what it takes to get someone to do it knowing that their life and the lives of their families doesn't depend on it. Maybe that shitty job at McDonalds now takes $20 an hour to fill? Maybe that increases automation, making the economy more efficient. It might also increase the cost of crappy food, pushing more people to just prepare their own food; but now they have the time to do it, so no big deal. We don't have a problem in this country with laziness. We don't have enough jobs for everyone who wants to work to work. We've set a requirement of 40-hours a week just to live, and then we don't actually have that much work available. We need to find a way to remove that 40-hour requirement. The economy is just too efficient.