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I want to write a really sarcastic comment, but that won't really achieve anything. I suspect that either I really don't get something, or that you really don'

I want to write a really sarcastic comment, but that won't really achieve anything. I suspect that either I really don't get something, or that you really don't get something but I can't tell which. You said "That's actually an argument for basic income" in response to my statement "if everyone stops working and starts taking basic income" which I don't understand. I thought I laid out a fairly clear argument that if everyone stopped working everything falls apart. To me, the logical next events are that with not enough taxes the government either prints money or defaults on its debt. That leads to either to massive inflation (undermining the value of basic income and perhaps resulting in civil unrest like in the Arab Spring when food prices got too high) or in the case of default, quite possibly the government ceasing to exist. So how does everyone taking the basic income solve a problem? Is the goal to get rid of the government? I can't take that seriously because if people are serious about a basic income, then it stands to reason that they want it to continue, and if the government fails, so does the basic income which it provides. I'm not saying US-style capitalism is great and perfect; it's clearly flawed in huge, huge ways. But that doesn't somehow make the flaws of a basic income system non-existent does it?

Zigurd 12y ago
> I thought I laid out a fairly clear argument that if everyone stopped working everything falls apart. Or the price of labor goes up. In a system where money buys the legislature, your only real recourse is to say "Fuck it, I'm out." Basic income would enable labor to vote by withholding labor. That's a feature, not a bug.
- msandford 12y ago
  Okay, that's an interesting take on the matter. I think in a world where money buys the legislature you'd end up with basic income repealed (or not passed in the first place) and as a result, it doesn't serve the intended function. That's actually why I'm really in love with mayday.us; Lawrence Lessig's PAC to get money out of politics by supporting people who want to do actual reform rather than just saying that want to. If we can actually vote the bastards out and get better people who won't be bought in, we've got a chance to shake things up and maybe fix some of the underlying problems that basic income seems like a solution to. I maintain that everyone could stop working and prices could rise enough such that basic income is a joke and everyone has to work again in order to eat, which kind of defeats the purpose of basic income. But I do appreciate your response.
unprepare 12y ago
lets think about it. Basic income is implemented tomorrow. First, only the people making up to the amount of the basic income would be willing to quit their jobs - anyone making more than needed to survive would certainly continue wanting to maximize their earnings. We would then have a vacuum of a large number of poorly payed jobs that are now in demand - would this not immediately raise the wages for these jobs? Would employers not have to raise wages to attract workers? They would either have to raise wages or automate in some way - this would be a big shakeup for companies, but with basic income even people losing jobs or companies going under would not be a huge deal since basic needs will be met for all those people So what if everyone quit their jobs and withdrew from the workforce all at once? Well, i think that wont happen - Would warren buffet quit his job? Would professional athletes? actors? Corporate accountants? Would your average HNer close up his startup? Would the bureaucrats running basic income quit? Would the bank tellers stop processing the checks? If they all did of course that would be chaos - food would immediately stop getting produced, water would stop flowing - sounds like a serious problem that hundreds of millions of people now have all the time and motivation to solve - but lets be honest, the likelihood of EVERYONE quitting their job is laughable, at worst the wages for most jobs will raise and some jobs will more rapidly be automated
- msandford 12y ago
  > First, only the people making up to the amount of the basic income would be willing to quit their jobs- anyone making more than needed to survive would certainly continue wanting to maximize their earnings You've made two assumptions here: 1. People are ENTIRELY rational (they're not) 2. No black market exists If you could guarantee that those conditions could be met, I would be much more willing to engage in the rest of your comment further. But they can't be met, not even close. In order to be useful the basic income has to be a substantial fraction of the median income, or else you can't really argue that it's basic. If receiving it means that you're still in poverty by a wide margin I don't think it's useful enough to talk seriously about. But once it's a substantial fraction of the median income, working looks less and less attractive. What I mean is that say $2000 for 0 hours worked in a month is very nice, and $2020 for 1 hour worked is at least in percentages, infinitely less desirable. Perhaps once you get up to 30 hours per week worked and $4400 in income you're starting to see some benefits from working in some kind of a meaningful way. The issue is that working has both a fixed amount of hassle and a marginal amount of hassle. Once you don't need to work to eat, now you're just doing gut-feeling comparisons of hassle/reward ratios. On days that I have to work I have to get out of bed, get dressed, commute, etc. That's a fair amount of hassle. There's also the marginal hassle of being at work and not getting to do exactly what I want. It wouldn't be worth it to do all the fixed overhead hassle to only work a hour a day because that would make such a small different in the total monthly income. So that leaves people wanting/needing to work more, probably at least a 4-6 hour day to amortize the fixed overhead of hassle into a reasonable number of hours to make the total amount of hassle substantially less than the money received so that working makes sense. So now that lots of people aren't willing to do low skill, low pay jobs the pay obviously would have to go up. But that means that prices are also going to go up. And that means that the basic income isn't basic anymore; it means that it's sub-basic since it can't provide for your basic needs. That then requires a bigger basic income, which leads to higher prices, which leads to higher basic income, until you've got at least the potential to have a zimbabwe-style hyperinflation. "Crucial to both components is discipline over the creation of additional money. However, the Mugabe government was printing money to finance involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, in 2000, in the Second Congo War, including higher salaries for army and government officials." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe Once those people (government officials and army) got more money and started to spend it, everyone started to realize that the money was not worth as much as they thought it was. That led to prices going up, which led to more money printing to keep salaries ahead of the curve and this spiraled out of control very quickly. Granted there's no guarantee that a similar kind of runaway would happen under the basic income. But it's definitely a very real risk. EDIT: I forgot to touch on the black market. If a person wants to accumulate income it might be better to do so on the black market. That allows a person to avoid high taxes (basic income has to come from somewhere, that somewhere is always proposed to be higher taxes). That makes the black market (or working "under the table") attractive. The shadow economy of Europe is already by one estimate 17% of the total economy. Basic income would further encourage such things: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/salman-sakir/black-market-economy_b_5460936.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/salman-sakir/black-market-econo...
barbudorojo 12y ago
"if everyone stops working and starts taking basic income" There is a pretty neat solution, if enconomy goes down then basic income goes down in such a way that no many people would like to be on basic income. If this seems harsh, I think that some force must be applied to restore the system. Anyway, to control any kind of system we have to take into account the lags in the feedback to make the system stable. If all people quit their jobs at once then there is no force (cops, military, and so) to restore the system to its orginal state and we lose control. We need to study how elastic is this desire to quit your job and act in accordance.

Zigurd 12y ago

> I thought I laid out a fairly clear argument that if everyone stopped working everything falls apart. Or the price of labor goes up. In a system where money buys the legislature, your only real recourse is to say "Fuck it, I'm out." Basic income would enable labor to vote by withholding labor. That's a feature, not a bug.

msandford 12y ago
Okay, that's an interesting take on the matter. I think in a world where money buys the legislature you'd end up with basic income repealed (or not passed in the first place) and as a result, it doesn't serve the intended function. That's actually why I'm really in love with mayday.us; Lawrence Lessig's PAC to get money out of politics by supporting people who want to do actual reform rather than just saying that want to. If we can actually vote the bastards out and get better people who won't be bought in, we've got a chance to shake things up and maybe fix some of the underlying problems that basic income seems like a solution to. I maintain that everyone could stop working and prices could rise enough such that basic income is a joke and everyone has to work again in order to eat, which kind of defeats the purpose of basic income. But I do appreciate your response.

unprepare 12y ago

lets think about it. Basic income is implemented tomorrow. First, only the people making up to the amount of the basic income would be willing to quit their jobs - anyone making more than needed to survive would certainly continue wanting to maximize their earnings. We would then have a vacuum of a large number of poorly payed jobs that are now in demand - would this not immediately raise the wages for these jobs? Would employers not have to raise wages to attract workers? They would either have to raise wages or automate in some way - this would be a big shakeup for companies, but with basic income even people losing jobs or companies going under would not be a huge deal since basic needs will be met for all those people So what if everyone quit their jobs and withdrew from the workforce all at once? Well, i think that wont happen - Would warren buffet quit his job? Would professional athletes? actors? Corporate accountants? Would your average HNer close up his startup? Would the bureaucrats running basic income quit? Would the bank tellers stop processing the checks? If they all did of course that would be chaos - food would immediately stop getting produced, water would stop flowing - sounds like a serious problem that hundreds of millions of people now have all the time and motivation to solve - but lets be honest, the likelihood of EVERYONE quitting their job is laughable, at worst the wages for most jobs will raise and some jobs will more rapidly be automated

msandford 12y ago
> First, only the people making up to the amount of the basic income would be willing to quit their jobs- anyone making more than needed to survive would certainly continue wanting to maximize their earnings You've made two assumptions here: 1. People are ENTIRELY rational (they're not) 2. No black market exists If you could guarantee that those conditions could be met, I would be much more willing to engage in the rest of your comment further. But they can't be met, not even close. In order to be useful the basic income has to be a substantial fraction of the median income, or else you can't really argue that it's basic. If receiving it means that you're still in poverty by a wide margin I don't think it's useful enough to talk seriously about. But once it's a substantial fraction of the median income, working looks less and less attractive. What I mean is that say $2000 for 0 hours worked in a month is very nice, and $2020 for 1 hour worked is at least in percentages, infinitely less desirable. Perhaps once you get up to 30 hours per week worked and $4400 in income you're starting to see some benefits from working in some kind of a meaningful way. The issue is that working has both a fixed amount of hassle and a marginal amount of hassle. Once you don't need to work to eat, now you're just doing gut-feeling comparisons of hassle/reward ratios. On days that I have to work I have to get out of bed, get dressed, commute, etc. That's a fair amount of hassle. There's also the marginal hassle of being at work and not getting to do exactly what I want. It wouldn't be worth it to do all the fixed overhead hassle to only work a hour a day because that would make such a small different in the total monthly income. So that leaves people wanting/needing to work more, probably at least a 4-6 hour day to amortize the fixed overhead of hassle into a reasonable number of hours to make the total amount of hassle substantially less than the money received so that working makes sense. So now that lots of people aren't willing to do low skill, low pay jobs the pay obviously would have to go up. But that means that prices are also going to go up. And that means that the basic income isn't basic anymore; it means that it's sub-basic since it can't provide for your basic needs. That then requires a bigger basic income, which leads to higher prices, which leads to higher basic income, until you've got at least the potential to have a zimbabwe-style hyperinflation. "Crucial to both components is discipline over the creation of additional money. However, the Mugabe government was printing money to finance involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, in 2000, in the Second Congo War, including higher salaries for army and government officials." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe Once those people (government officials and army) got more money and started to spend it, everyone started to realize that the money was not worth as much as they thought it was. That led to prices going up, which led to more money printing to keep salaries ahead of the curve and this spiraled out of control very quickly. Granted there's no guarantee that a similar kind of runaway would happen under the basic income. But it's definitely a very real risk. EDIT: I forgot to touch on the black market. If a person wants to accumulate income it might be better to do so on the black market. That allows a person to avoid high taxes (basic income has to come from somewhere, that somewhere is always proposed to be higher taxes). That makes the black market (or working "under the table") attractive. The shadow economy of Europe is already by one estimate 17% of the total economy. Basic income would further encourage such things: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/salman-sakir/black-market-economy_b_5460936.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/salman-sakir/black-market-econo...

barbudorojo 12y ago

"if everyone stops working and starts taking basic income" There is a pretty neat solution, if enconomy goes down then basic income goes down in such a way that no many people would like to be on basic income. If this seems harsh, I think that some force must be applied to restore the system. Anyway, to control any kind of system we have to take into account the lags in the feedback to make the system stable. If all people quit their jobs at once then there is no force (cops, military, and so) to restore the system to its orginal state and we lose control. We need to study how elastic is this desire to quit your job and act in accordance.