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I'm generally against the notion of a basic income, as I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose n

I'm generally against the notion of a basic income, as I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything, but I am certainly not against the idea of trying it in small experiments and seeing what happens. And as for these experiments, I wonder how many of the test subjects were low-income prior to the introduction of basic income? The fear isn't that people with a so-called 'Protestant' work ethic will stop working, is it? The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working. If you want to get better data, and more specifically, if you want to alleviate the concerns that most people have with a basic income, give a poor black or latino community a basic income and monitor what happens. If the experiment turns out to be a success, do it a couple more times, each time in different locales across the country. That's the data you need if you really want to make a basic income a political possibility. Everything else is just half-measures.

dasil003 13y ago
Well we currently have welfare, and we know that there are cases where that prevents someone from taking a job because it will be mean a net loss. Basic income will be an improvement in this regard at least because there is much less disincentive to work if it doesn't mean losing something.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  You see that? That right there - that's tantamount to reliance on a half-measure, and people aren't going to buy those weak arguments. If you want to make basic income a political possibility, you need data. This is something which can be tested at small scales, and relatively cheaply. We should definitely do that, scaling the test size up as we go. Hell, a private organization could do this. Where's George Soros when you need him?
  - felipe 13y ago
    Actually the data is available. The city of Newark for example has implemented several small-scale social innovations during the past few years, and they focused very much on data gathering and statistics. We don't see that in the media because it does not fit their narrative, and it does not fare well for opinion-makers to stand-up for that either. But the data is out there
    - notdrunkatall 13y ago
      Where is it? A quick google search for 'newark basic income' yields nothing.
      - felipe 13y ago
        Google "Cory Booker". He is a politician, so any link I include here will create controversy, but his model was to implement small-scale experiments, collect data, and use that data to gather additional funding from external sources.
        notdrunkatall 13y ago
        We're talking about basic income here, not increasing housing available to people under the poverty line. The data isn't available, at least not where you've said it was.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    You don't need to jump down my throat with your obsession with data. You won't get data until someone decides it's worth trying, and the broken-ness of the welfare system is an pretty good basis to justify such an experiment. I'm sure if you dig up the data on welfare it can be used somehow to satisfy your statistical justification requirements, but keep in mind that public opinion is not as easily swayed by a good dataset as engineers are.
    - notdrunkatall 13y ago
felipe 13y ago
> I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything Three-quarters of adult recipients of the Brazilian basic income system do work [1]. Like the parent commenter said, "without solid evidence, statements like that are little more than expressions of ideological preference, both on the left and on the right." [1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-giving-cash-directly-to-the-poor-paid-off-in-brazil http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-giving-cash-directly-to...
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that. If you want to do this, you need the data which proves that it can work in the USA.
  - velis_vel 13y ago
    > Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that. Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.
  - kijin 13y ago
    This seems like a case of "Is the cup half full or half empty?" In any case, methinks your obsession with unemployment rate is one of the things that we must seriously reconsider if we really want to be objective about the merits (or lack thereof) of basic income (BI). Let's get a bit philosophical here. One of the fundamental premises of BI is that it's OK for a substantial portion of a future society not to do anything that is traditionally considered "work". And one of the reasons we need to experiment with BI is to see whether or not this seemingly outrageous premise turns out to be correct after all. Including the unemployment rate in your definition of "it can work in the U.S." is inherently biased against BI because it already assumes the opposite of one of the premises of BI. It's like trying to decide between theism and atheism using the Bible as your measuring stick. Regardless of what conclusion you draw at the end of the day, that competition ain't fair. In order to make a fair decision, we'll need to go a little meta and ask, for example, about the total productivity of the society, the physical and mental well-being of its citizens, or something like that.
smirksirlot 13y ago
> The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working. That's ridiculously racist. Poverty being tied to race doesn't necessarily have to do with innate work ethic.
- billmalarky 13y ago
  At first I thought he was being unfairly racist too, but after a second reading I think he has a strong point. His point being that in order to make it politically achievable we need data that proves it works with the type of people that bigots believe it will fail with. People might be publicly politically correct, but they vote they way they truly believe. Prove without a doubt that it works with poor minorities in America, and you prove without a doubt that it works.
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    Precisely. If it is a workable system, the experiment will be a success, a community will have benefited, and you will have your political ammunition to have it scaled up. If it is a failure, well, it would be much preferable to know this before implementing it on a large scale, for obvious reasons. Let's not politicize something which can be easily and cheaply tested with scientific rigor. If it works, it works. If not, then okay.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  You're right about the second statement, and quite wrong about the first. Poverty is tied to race because race is tied to subculture. Work ethic is no more a racial quality than is the propensity to dance like a fool (edit: by this, I mean white people dancing like fools) or to enjoy eating burritos. But it is well known that the so-called 'Protestant work ethic' is a strong component of white American subculture, whereas it exists less strongly in the black subculture. Other races (such as Asians and Jews) have similar cultural values which encourage a strong work ethic. The American black subculture, on the other hand, does not seem to instill nearly as high a value on hard work in its children as do the others. On the contrary, the system is perceived as being a white construct, and black children who are perceived as trying to join that system are often shunned for 'acting white.' That is not a racial issue, it's a cultural issue, but its genesis has no bearing on the final result where basic income is concerned, at least not in the short run. I do think that the black subculture is beginning to appreciate the value of hard work more, but according to the data, it still has a ways to go. Latino subculture as it exists in the USA is similar, but perhaps to a lesser extent. If you think that's a racist statement, I suggest you look up the definition of racist, remove your emotions and preconceived biases from the issue, google some things ('acting white', 'black work ethic', etc) focus on what I actually said rather than reading between the lines, so to speak, and reevaluate accordingly.
mcv 13y ago
Have you read they article? They gave notoriously homeless people in London 3000 pounds each, and most of the homeless used it quite effectively to get their lives back in order. The very idea that there's a lazy underclass that needs to be forced to work against their will is a really big part of the problem here. If there's anything that keeps the poor from being productive, it's their lack of money. The constant worry about basic survival drains their energy and attention and keeps them from getting their lives back on track. Give them some leeway, and they may surprise you, as this and many other experiments keep showing.
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  This is a just a nice rhetoric, but unimplementable in practice due to existence of cheaters and free riders. It is the same as "easy credit" solution - people just won't pay back, even if they imagine they would. The answer is, ironically, equivalent to investing in a talent, exactly what YC does, and also unimplementable, because east majority of "applicants" would be worthless. Actually even now nothing blocks talented people from rising out of slums or even homelessness. Look at places like India, they really do.
  - mcv 13y ago
    > This is a just a nice rhetoric, but unimplementable in practice due to existence of cheaters and free riders. There's no way to cheat, and if you'd read the article, you'd have seen all the instances that disprove this popular "free rider" myth. The simple fact is: people like money, and they're willing to work to get more of it. Very few people choose poverty if they have other options.

dasil003 13y ago

Well we currently have welfare, and we know that there are cases where that prevents someone from taking a job because it will be mean a net loss. Basic income will be an improvement in this regard at least because there is much less disincentive to work if it doesn't mean losing something.

notdrunkatall 13y ago
You see that? That right there - that's tantamount to reliance on a half-measure, and people aren't going to buy those weak arguments. If you want to make basic income a political possibility, you need data. This is something which can be tested at small scales, and relatively cheaply. We should definitely do that, scaling the test size up as we go. Hell, a private organization could do this. Where's George Soros when you need him?
- felipe 13y ago
  Actually the data is available. The city of Newark for example has implemented several small-scale social innovations during the past few years, and they focused very much on data gathering and statistics. We don't see that in the media because it does not fit their narrative, and it does not fare well for opinion-makers to stand-up for that either. But the data is out there
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    Where is it? A quick google search for 'newark basic income' yields nothing.
    - felipe 13y ago
      Google "Cory Booker". He is a politician, so any link I include here will create controversy, but his model was to implement small-scale experiments, collect data, and use that data to gather additional funding from external sources.
      - notdrunkatall 13y ago
        We're talking about basic income here, not increasing housing available to people under the poverty line. The data isn't available, at least not where you've said it was.
- dasil003 13y ago
  You don't need to jump down my throat with your obsession with data. You won't get data until someone decides it's worth trying, and the broken-ness of the welfare system is an pretty good basis to justify such an experiment. I'm sure if you dig up the data on welfare it can be used somehow to satisfy your statistical justification requirements, but keep in mind that public opinion is not as easily swayed by a good dataset as engineers are.
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago

felipe 13y ago

> I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything Three-quarters of adult recipients of the Brazilian basic income system do work [1]. Like the parent commenter said, "without solid evidence, statements like that are little more than expressions of ideological preference, both on the left and on the right." [1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-giving-cash-directly-to-the-poor-paid-off-in-brazil http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-giving-cash-directly-to...

notdrunkatall 13y ago
Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that. If you want to do this, you need the data which proves that it can work in the USA.
- velis_vel 13y ago
  > Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that. Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.
- kijin 13y ago
  This seems like a case of "Is the cup half full or half empty?" In any case, methinks your obsession with unemployment rate is one of the things that we must seriously reconsider if we really want to be objective about the merits (or lack thereof) of basic income (BI). Let's get a bit philosophical here. One of the fundamental premises of BI is that it's OK for a substantial portion of a future society not to do anything that is traditionally considered "work". And one of the reasons we need to experiment with BI is to see whether or not this seemingly outrageous premise turns out to be correct after all. Including the unemployment rate in your definition of "it can work in the U.S." is inherently biased against BI because it already assumes the opposite of one of the premises of BI. It's like trying to decide between theism and atheism using the Bible as your measuring stick. Regardless of what conclusion you draw at the end of the day, that competition ain't fair. In order to make a fair decision, we'll need to go a little meta and ask, for example, about the total productivity of the society, the physical and mental well-being of its citizens, or something like that.

smirksirlot 13y ago

> The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working. That's ridiculously racist. Poverty being tied to race doesn't necessarily have to do with innate work ethic.

billmalarky 13y ago
At first I thought he was being unfairly racist too, but after a second reading I think he has a strong point. His point being that in order to make it politically achievable we need data that proves it works with the type of people that bigots believe it will fail with. People might be publicly politically correct, but they vote they way they truly believe. Prove without a doubt that it works with poor minorities in America, and you prove without a doubt that it works.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  Precisely. If it is a workable system, the experiment will be a success, a community will have benefited, and you will have your political ammunition to have it scaled up. If it is a failure, well, it would be much preferable to know this before implementing it on a large scale, for obvious reasons. Let's not politicize something which can be easily and cheaply tested with scientific rigor. If it works, it works. If not, then okay.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
You're right about the second statement, and quite wrong about the first. Poverty is tied to race because race is tied to subculture. Work ethic is no more a racial quality than is the propensity to dance like a fool (edit: by this, I mean white people dancing like fools) or to enjoy eating burritos. But it is well known that the so-called 'Protestant work ethic' is a strong component of white American subculture, whereas it exists less strongly in the black subculture. Other races (such as Asians and Jews) have similar cultural values which encourage a strong work ethic. The American black subculture, on the other hand, does not seem to instill nearly as high a value on hard work in its children as do the others. On the contrary, the system is perceived as being a white construct, and black children who are perceived as trying to join that system are often shunned for 'acting white.' That is not a racial issue, it's a cultural issue, but its genesis has no bearing on the final result where basic income is concerned, at least not in the short run. I do think that the black subculture is beginning to appreciate the value of hard work more, but according to the data, it still has a ways to go. Latino subculture as it exists in the USA is similar, but perhaps to a lesser extent. If you think that's a racist statement, I suggest you look up the definition of racist, remove your emotions and preconceived biases from the issue, google some things ('acting white', 'black work ethic', etc) focus on what I actually said rather than reading between the lines, so to speak, and reevaluate accordingly.

mcv 13y ago

Have you read they article? They gave notoriously homeless people in London 3000 pounds each, and most of the homeless used it quite effectively to get their lives back in order. The very idea that there's a lazy underclass that needs to be forced to work against their will is a really big part of the problem here. If there's anything that keeps the poor from being productive, it's their lack of money. The constant worry about basic survival drains their energy and attention and keeps them from getting their lives back on track. Give them some leeway, and they may surprise you, as this and many other experiments keep showing.

dschiptsov 13y ago
This is a just a nice rhetoric, but unimplementable in practice due to existence of cheaters and free riders. It is the same as "easy credit" solution - people just won't pay back, even if they imagine they would. The answer is, ironically, equivalent to investing in a talent, exactly what YC does, and also unimplementable, because east majority of "applicants" would be worthless. Actually even now nothing blocks talented people from rising out of slums or even homelessness. Look at places like India, they really do.
- mcv 13y ago
  > This is a just a nice rhetoric, but unimplementable in practice due to existence of cheaters and free riders. There's no way to cheat, and if you'd read the article, you'd have seen all the instances that disprove this popular "free rider" myth. The simple fact is: people like money, and they're willing to work to get more of it. Very few people choose poverty if they have other options.