4 ms·

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amou

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more. Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death, only for want of choice.

istjohn 12y ago
In kind welfare is notoriously inefficient. The bureaucracy required weighs down the system. No one knows what they need better than the people themselves.
- Benji_San 12y ago
  The current overly bureaucratic welfare systems are reactions on the idea that everyone is supposed to have a "job". If you don't have a job your job is to navigate the welfare system to "earn" your welfare income while you are "looking for a job that doesn't necessarily exist". The overly bureaucratic system also require more people to maintain it which means jobs are created through it, which ultimately is a good thing because more jobs is obviously a good thing in the western economies, right?
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Inefficient in what terms? If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods. If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive to the aid. Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.
taeric 12y ago
I would think your proposal is actually harder. Providing money is relatively straight forward. All of the decisions that would go into producing and distributing basic food, clothing, etc would be a bloody nightmare. Especially since it could be avoided by simply offloading it to the "private" sector.
jfoutz 12y ago
I'm not completely clear i understand the distinction. With basic income, you just get cash (or a tax deduction if you're making money - the original proposal was around 2x the deduction vs cash). you can do whatever you want with it. like eating steak more than having a large living space? Do that. I get the impression you're wanting to provide standardized essentials, a room, 5 shirts, 5 pants, government cheese. This invariably leads to weird market issues, people want more of X so they sell off some of Y - for example, using foodstamps to buy steak, then selling it in the parking lot for a big discount. Why bother with that administrative hassle, and innefficiency? the vast majority of people want what they want, and balance their resources as well as they can. The biggest complaint about US welfare is it's so inflexible. "Easy" to get food, but sometimes people need extra cash to fix their car. That's pretty much impossible in the current system.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  It is true that the market is efficient in getting people what they want and that the government is not. However that is not desirable in this case since it makes it too easy to live on government money with little incentives to take whatever job you can. If you lived in a government room, got your government clothing and ate in your government chow hall/mess tent/whatever then you could get a benefit out of shoveling dogshit for 10usd/hour since you could get a better shirt, a more tasty meal, etc. You can't sell access to a government bed because every person would be entitled to one, you can't sell access to government food if any person could show up and you could sell your government shit, but to whom? That person would also be able to get 5 shirts. With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table, you would have to provide incentives to work (since it is better for society), etc. When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work. And it will be an epic achievement, but in the transition period we still have to use the carrot and stick.
  - jfoutz 12y ago
    Which is the point of the deduction. Any work at all is better than sitting around doing nothing. - I'd suggest you check out Friedman's original position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM It's elegant.
TuringTest 12y ago
The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides. Moreover, it would discourage working to get more money, since if you want to move into a less frugal home, you would lose all the benefits of having a government issued one. That choice would then be seen as a net lose.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides. More fundamentally, in my view, is that basic income represents the citizens pro rata share of a portion of taxation that represents rents on the commons; the purpose government serves is to collect and distribute for efficiency as N:1 + 1:M interchanges involve transaction costs for N+M transactions rather than the N*M that are required for N:M direct transactions, but government has no reason to choose how the rents are spent (and there are, as you note, all kinds of pragmatic downsides when the government does that.)
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Because basic income respects human freedom, and as automation advances and the rewards of the economy in pure-market terms increasingly shift even further from labor to capital, a basic income that is adjusted in amount as the economy shifts provides a comparatively light touch redistribution represent rents on the commons that maintains opportunity (as the recipients can choose how to allocate the basic income between present consumption needs and investment in personal development and/or capital) whereas "basic welfare" creates a permanently dependent, effectively unfree, class with no mobility, opportunity, or effective choices.
- grinnbearit 12y ago
  The idea is to have a floor on consequences, people make bad choices or are just plain unlucky. Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet. Eliminating choice is important, it solves the underlying issue (people dying) while removing opportunities to exploit (reselling food stamps). Incentives to be productive don't go away, can you create something other people want? Art? Literature? Take a loan or find investors. Worst case scenario you end up back on welfare. Welfare needs to be thought of as a cost, not an investment.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet. That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high. One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it. > Incentives to be productive don't go away With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.
jcromartie 12y ago
Can you imagine government-issue food, clothing, and shelter? That's destined to be some horribly depressing Soviet-type shit right there. With a basic income, even the people who are not working can participate in the market and drive the competition and innovation of people who are producing goods and services.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Exactly. The point is to make it so that you can survive like that but you always have incentives to work, even a little. If you don't you will walk around in clothing that is obviously provided by the state (manufactures of clothing will work hard to make sure their clothing doesn't look like that), living a state area, eathing state food (may be pretty healthy, actually) - so everybody will know you belong on the bottom of society. Yet nobody really suffers like they do today, nobody has to go hungry (this also helps those whoes parents aren't good with money, since they will still get food) nobody has to become homeless.
  - jcromartie 12y ago
    Shame is a terrible motivator. Instead you'll probably get even more stratification and ghettoization, while the "haves" operate in their own bubble. You have concocted a perfect setup for a cyberpunk dystopian future, and honestly it would make a pretty good plot. I'm imagining the urchins living in identical concrete boxes that make up the under-city dwellings, lining up in droves for their government pants.
guizzy 12y ago
Because centrally planned economies have been notoriously unable to predict and meet demand. Adequately meeting demand is important, especially considering how fresh and healthy food is for the most part perishable. Perhaps one day, when/if something like Soylent can be supplied as a utility this would work.
- grinnbearit 12y ago
  This isn't a centrally planned economy, its a centrally planned expense. Once you know how many people you need to provide for, how much it costs is simple multiplication. Mass manufacturing and predictable consumption will help reduce costs even further. Basic Income is harder, how much do I pay to prevent people suffering? Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? People will still die whatever you do (and whether you do it by BI or whether you do it by central purchasing of common goodie baskets) -- probably more in the latter case than the former, for a given expenditure level, because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ. > What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed? People can -- and do -- gamble goods when they don't have cash, and get robbed of goods as well; those aren't problems unique to cash, nor are they problems that central purchasing of common baskets of goods makes any easier to address than distributing cash does.
    - grinnbearit 12y ago
      "because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ." I don't understand how the overhead costs are higher with more predictable results and mass production (or are we defining costs differently?). Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets? I'm proposing unlimited baskets of goods purely for predictable cost reasons, it doesn't really matter if they gamble them away, although I find it unlikely they'd find any takers since everyone has access to the same baskets. Welfare is a cost, basic income doesn't seem like it would satisfy that cost in the most efficient way.

istjohn 12y ago

In kind welfare is notoriously inefficient. The bureaucracy required weighs down the system. No one knows what they need better than the people themselves.

Benji_San 12y ago
The current overly bureaucratic welfare systems are reactions on the idea that everyone is supposed to have a "job". If you don't have a job your job is to navigate the welfare system to "earn" your welfare income while you are "looking for a job that doesn't necessarily exist". The overly bureaucratic system also require more people to maintain it which means jobs are created through it, which ultimately is a good thing because more jobs is obviously a good thing in the western economies, right?
tomjen3 12y ago
Inefficient in what terms? If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods. If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive to the aid. Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.

taeric 12y ago

I would think your proposal is actually harder. Providing money is relatively straight forward. All of the decisions that would go into producing and distributing basic food, clothing, etc would be a bloody nightmare. Especially since it could be avoided by simply offloading it to the "private" sector.

jfoutz 12y ago

I'm not completely clear i understand the distinction. With basic income, you just get cash (or a tax deduction if you're making money - the original proposal was around 2x the deduction vs cash). you can do whatever you want with it. like eating steak more than having a large living space? Do that. I get the impression you're wanting to provide standardized essentials, a room, 5 shirts, 5 pants, government cheese. This invariably leads to weird market issues, people want more of X so they sell off some of Y - for example, using foodstamps to buy steak, then selling it in the parking lot for a big discount. Why bother with that administrative hassle, and innefficiency? the vast majority of people want what they want, and balance their resources as well as they can. The biggest complaint about US welfare is it's so inflexible. "Easy" to get food, but sometimes people need extra cash to fix their car. That's pretty much impossible in the current system.

tomjen3 12y ago
It is true that the market is efficient in getting people what they want and that the government is not. However that is not desirable in this case since it makes it too easy to live on government money with little incentives to take whatever job you can. If you lived in a government room, got your government clothing and ate in your government chow hall/mess tent/whatever then you could get a benefit out of shoveling dogshit for 10usd/hour since you could get a better shirt, a more tasty meal, etc. You can't sell access to a government bed because every person would be entitled to one, you can't sell access to government food if any person could show up and you could sell your government shit, but to whom? That person would also be able to get 5 shirts. With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table, you would have to provide incentives to work (since it is better for society), etc. When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work. And it will be an epic achievement, but in the transition period we still have to use the carrot and stick.
- jfoutz 12y ago
  Which is the point of the deduction. Any work at all is better than sitting around doing nothing. - I'd suggest you check out Friedman's original position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM It's elegant.

TuringTest 12y ago

The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides. Moreover, it would discourage working to get more money, since if you want to move into a less frugal home, you would lose all the benefits of having a government issued one. That choice would then be seen as a net lose.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides. More fundamentally, in my view, is that basic income represents the citizens pro rata share of a portion of taxation that represents rents on the commons; the purpose government serves is to collect and distribute for efficiency as N:1 + 1:M interchanges involve transaction costs for N+M transactions rather than the N*M that are required for N:M direct transactions, but government has no reason to choose how the rents are spent (and there are, as you note, all kinds of pragmatic downsides when the government does that.)

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Because basic income respects human freedom, and as automation advances and the rewards of the economy in pure-market terms increasingly shift even further from labor to capital, a basic income that is adjusted in amount as the economy shifts provides a comparatively light touch redistribution represent rents on the commons that maintains opportunity (as the recipients can choose how to allocate the basic income between present consumption needs and investment in personal development and/or capital) whereas "basic welfare" creates a permanently dependent, effectively unfree, class with no mobility, opportunity, or effective choices.

grinnbearit 12y ago
The idea is to have a floor on consequences, people make bad choices or are just plain unlucky. Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet. Eliminating choice is important, it solves the underlying issue (people dying) while removing opportunities to exploit (reselling food stamps). Incentives to be productive don't go away, can you create something other people want? Art? Literature? Take a loan or find investors. Worst case scenario you end up back on welfare. Welfare needs to be thought of as a cost, not an investment.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet. That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high. One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it. > Incentives to be productive don't go away With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.

jcromartie 12y ago

Can you imagine government-issue food, clothing, and shelter? That's destined to be some horribly depressing Soviet-type shit right there. With a basic income, even the people who are not working can participate in the market and drive the competition and innovation of people who are producing goods and services.

tomjen3 12y ago
Exactly. The point is to make it so that you can survive like that but you always have incentives to work, even a little. If you don't you will walk around in clothing that is obviously provided by the state (manufactures of clothing will work hard to make sure their clothing doesn't look like that), living a state area, eathing state food (may be pretty healthy, actually) - so everybody will know you belong on the bottom of society. Yet nobody really suffers like they do today, nobody has to go hungry (this also helps those whoes parents aren't good with money, since they will still get food) nobody has to become homeless.
- jcromartie 12y ago
  Shame is a terrible motivator. Instead you'll probably get even more stratification and ghettoization, while the "haves" operate in their own bubble. You have concocted a perfect setup for a cyberpunk dystopian future, and honestly it would make a pretty good plot. I'm imagining the urchins living in identical concrete boxes that make up the under-city dwellings, lining up in droves for their government pants.

guizzy 12y ago

Because centrally planned economies have been notoriously unable to predict and meet demand. Adequately meeting demand is important, especially considering how fresh and healthy food is for the most part perishable. Perhaps one day, when/if something like Soylent can be supplied as a utility this would work.

grinnbearit 12y ago
This isn't a centrally planned economy, its a centrally planned expense. Once you know how many people you need to provide for, how much it costs is simple multiplication. Mass manufacturing and predictable consumption will help reduce costs even further. Basic Income is harder, how much do I pay to prevent people suffering? Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? People will still die whatever you do (and whether you do it by BI or whether you do it by central purchasing of common goodie baskets) -- probably more in the latter case than the former, for a given expenditure level, because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ. > What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed? People can -- and do -- gamble goods when they don't have cash, and get robbed of goods as well; those aren't problems unique to cash, nor are they problems that central purchasing of common baskets of goods makes any easier to address than distributing cash does.
  - grinnbearit 12y ago
    "because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ." I don't understand how the overhead costs are higher with more predictable results and mass production (or are we defining costs differently?). Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets? I'm proposing unlimited baskets of goods purely for predictable cost reasons, it doesn't really matter if they gamble them away, although I find it unlikely they'd find any takers since everyone has access to the same baskets. Welfare is a cost, basic income doesn't seem like it would satisfy that cost in the most efficient way.