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> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just
by nkoren 13y ago
> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.
With this comment, it becomes difficult to see how you're arguing in good faith. If your Basic Job tells you to work at a particular time of day -- and classes and/or a part-time job are in the middle of this work schedule -- then they conflict. Sure, you can go to school and/or take the part-time job instead, but then you starve.
How is it that you're incapable of understanding that this creates a conflict?
> Back of the envelope calculation, please.
Okay, using your straw-man scenario, there are 50M people requiring $20k worth of income. That costs $1T upfront (same as if we provided the $20k Basic Income to all 300M people). Now with our Basic Job, we're basically asking people to do work that they don't want to do -- since as you point out, if they're not closely supervised then they won't do the work.
So let's assume we need a poorly-paid supervisor for every 12 basic-jobbers, a somewhat better-paid line manager for every 20 supervisors, a somewhat well-paid district manager for every 50 line managers, and an actually well-paid regional manager for every 100 district supervisors. Furthermore, lets assume that all these jobs come from the ranks of the currently-unemployed, so that they're not pure overhead but are providing support in and of themselves.
Job description $/year No. of people Total cost
Basic Jobber 20k 45,973,453 919.5B
Supervisor 30k 3,831,121 114.9B
Line Manager 40k 191,556 7.7B
District Manager 60k 3,831 0.2B
Regional Manager 100k 383 -
...This would be an overhead of about 4.2%, compared to the effectively zero overhead which a Basic Income requires (all you need for BI is one-time-only verification of citizenship, and careful monitoring of when people die so that the payments stop. You don't need to employ millions of people to do that). So this would cost roughly $420M more than an equivalent Basic Income program, while simultaneously preventing 50M people from doing something more useful with their lives.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoGoing with your numbers, if a basic jobber costs $7.25/hour and they produce $0.30 worth of value, the Basic Job pays for it's own overhead. And of course, $1T < $6T. I must commend you on actually thinking things through carefully and checking if, numerically, a policy is remotely plausible. It's so rare to see on threads like this.
- nitrogen 13y agoYou don't actually need all $6T, because most people will be paying taxes that equal or exceed what they receive from BI. You mentioned earlier that BI disincentivizes work. How so? It seems to me that it would not, because the basic income doesn't disappear the instant you start working even a little bit.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoThis one is pretty straightforward. BI disincentivizes work because it stays with you if you stop working. On the common assumption that people are working for the money, not for the joy of showing up, this reduces the penalty for not working, which will cause a rise in... not working.
- nitrogen 13y agoThe arguments for BI that I've read here on HN assert that this isn't a problem, because people who don't want to be working are a net drain on the systems in which they work, and/or they will be replaced by people who want to work a little bit but can't because they will lose disability. The incentive to continue working even if you receive BI is that BI won't be enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, just enough to meet basic needs and educate oneself.
- ThomPete 13y agoWith BI it always is beneficial to work. Even if you only work for a couple of months a year (for instance picking strawberries) you will make more money than not doing anything. So if anything BI incentives people to work even if only for once in a while.
- dllthomas 13y agoAll this shows is that BI doesn't entirely eliminate existing incentives to work. That's uncontroversial. It could still very well be that BI provides a disincentive relative to an identical system without BI.
- timdierks 13y agoWhere's the calculation for how much it costs to give the $20K/person to the employed? Unless unemployment is above 96%, it will be more than the 4.2% overhead you hypothesize here.