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The sad situation is that most American's don't have nearly enough saved for retirement and most never will. That's why social security actually exists and it's

The sad situation is that most American's don't have nearly enough saved for retirement and most never will. That's why social security actually exists and it's not that great for those that end-up depending solely on that type of income. Essentially, we already have the situation you described without any of the other benefits BI would bring. Here's another HuffPo article that has some very disturbing figures on this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/die-than-retire-poor_n_6042682.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/die-than-retire-poo.... If the given individual is ok with the standard of living BI offers, there is no need to do extra work. That's kind of the point. On the flip side, if the person wants more luxuries or spending power, he or she will stay in the workforce, either working part-time or full-time. The amount of work and effort a person will need to exert will depend on how much better than the base he or she wants to live. BI will undoubtedly result in some inflation, but if managed properly, will prevent poverty as we know it today. Of course poverty in US today is nothing like poverty in the middle ages Europe, so one day people will look at living on BI alone as living in poverty. It's all in degrees of better or worse. The benefit of BI is that people no longer live in fear of their world collapsing completely if they lose their employment. Today in US, for most people if you lose employment you also lose healthcare. Obamacare is still not there to truly act as a safety net. (Speaking from family member experience.) With BI, the unemployment rate becomes a lot less important, because so long as the capital streams are flowing and proper taxation is in place, consumption won't collapse beyond the minimum level afforded by BI. In the end, I still believe people will continue to work regardless of BI. Some will drop-out, but enough will stay. It's about empowering personal choice.

bane 12y ago
What you and every other BI advocate simply ignores (I don't even know why I'm wasting my breath on this) is that people who remain in the labor pool will not necessarily realize benefits from staying in the pool. Increasingly, they will be supporting more and more people who choose not to join the pool. The percentage of money they earn that they actually get to keep will grow less and less because more of it is going out to pay for people who aren't working. Eventually, a rational actor in the labor pool will ask themselves, "why bother?", and will drop out as well. It's a vicious cycle, not a virtuous one. A working person in a universal BI scheme is not earning BI + a normal job earnings, they're earning BI + job earning - cost to provide BI for non-productive people. It's that simple and BI advocacy circles continue to refuse to produce an economic model that even acknowledges this simple truism let alone demonstrates how efficient the remaining workers need to be to both cover their increasingly non-working fellows and gain any benefits worth working for. More likely, and what usually happens in schemes where earned labor value earned is separated from labor input is that laborers become disincentivized. People who wish to work would simply stop working in the formal economy and maximize value capture by working in an underground economy. This creates a negative feedback cycle as fewer and fewer people take part in the formal economy (where the government can capture and redistribute their production to people who aren't). This rapidly bankrupts the scheme and turns labor into a punitive action by the state. "We need workers producing capturable value, therefore you must work" and the point of BI is quickly lost. BI advocates are unable to demonstrate why this isn't simply true and why every single time labor is disentangled from incentives the system goes bankrupt except with the vaguest possible handwaivy nonsense and pronouncements that it simply won't happen under their particular version of the scheme because of no particular reasons at all except for wishes and dreams. And then Mincome is usually brought up somewhere. BI models must account for labor drop-out, must account for how this disincentives the remaining labor pool and reduces value capture within the labor pool. "Empowering personal choice" is not a valid model. "Some will drop-out, but enough will stay." is not a model. How many, what percent? Why that percent? What's the impact of various drop-out rates on various actor models? How much does production need to increase on the remaining labor pool to maintain equilibrium? Is that achievable? What happens to purchasing power when most products become effectively free? What about maintaining growth at x,y and z percentages? If new money supply is introduced to compensate, what impact does this have on inflation? What's the delta from the best-case model to the worst-case? How are both of those extreme models justified by observed and predicted actor behavior? What compensation levers does the government have to incentivize labor participation? What's the degree of input in each and the known and/or expected outcomes? How does each lever's outputs change the previous questions output? I've never even seen so much as an Excel spreadsheet that models the simplest question I've put here. What happens when drop-out is 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 70%? Is the proposed BI scheme sustainable? Why or why not? What happens in an unsustainable system? Can unsustainable systems be "fixed" and brought back into sustainability? By what means? What happens if there's not full local/national/regional/global participation? How does the scheme compensate for imperfect participation? Has this compensation plan been modeled and tested under previously identified circumstances? If the system becomes unsustainable, what does failure look like? Can hard failures be corrected? How do we adjust to bring unskilled out-of-labor-pool people back into the labor pool in the event of a lack of sustainment and eventual failure? The modeling isn't hard, it's just tedious and it has to be done or BI will continue to be the butt of economic jokes. BI needs a body of real thought behind it, not hand-waivy well wishing. It needs a cumulative and unimpeachable story to show that it really is a better idea than the ideas we're working off of now. But BI doesn't offer any of that. It offers wishes and naive hopeful dreams of a global population suddenly achieving self-actualization all at once. It's a nice picture, but anybody can write any sort of Utopian fantasy fiction that makes any sort of crazy idea sound workable. Here's one: - We all need underwear - Let's all make underwear - I've solved supply-demand issues, monetary imbalance, underwear shortages and brought about a golden utopia for all time. The numbers must work out. Math cannot be fudged by our personal feelings. I've seen HVAC system with better planning documents than any BI scheme. It's absolutely exhausting to keep explaining this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794247
- read 12y ago
  Write an essay about it. You seem to understand it well enough to explain, and care enough to keep explaining in spite of how exhausting it is. You practically wrote half of the essay with that comment alone. Sort out all arguments against BI to focus the discussion and you could be onto something.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  'Increasingly, they will be supporting more and more people who choose not to join the pool. The percentage of money they earn that they actually get to keep will grow less and less because more of it is going out to pay for people who aren't working. Eventually, a rational actor in the labor pool will ask themselves, "why bother?", and will drop out as well. It's a vicious cycle, not a virtuous one.' There are two things this misses: 1) Some of the funding for BI may come from taxation of land or capital (in the economic factors of production sense), not just labor. 2) Inflation. As people leave the labor pool, it gets more expensive to make things. As the dollar buys less, the basic income buys less, and there is more pressure for people to get working again. "Inflation adjusted BI drawn exclusively from tax on labor" seems to be what you've considered, but it also seems to be a particularly difficult position in the space of possible policies.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I attempted it once, more as a lead in to a monte carlo tutorial than anything else. The results were not particularly favorable to a BI. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096 The response from most of the BI supporters was approximately what you'd expect.

bane 12y ago

What you and every other BI advocate simply ignores (I don't even know why I'm wasting my breath on this) is that people who remain in the labor pool will not necessarily realize benefits from staying in the pool. Increasingly, they will be supporting more and more people who choose not to join the pool. The percentage of money they earn that they actually get to keep will grow less and less because more of it is going out to pay for people who aren't working. Eventually, a rational actor in the labor pool will ask themselves, "why bother?", and will drop out as well. It's a vicious cycle, not a virtuous one. A working person in a universal BI scheme is not earning BI + a normal job earnings, they're earning BI + job earning - cost to provide BI for non-productive people. It's that simple and BI advocacy circles continue to refuse to produce an economic model that even acknowledges this simple truism let alone demonstrates how efficient the remaining workers need to be to both cover their increasingly non-working fellows and gain any benefits worth working for. More likely, and what usually happens in schemes where earned labor value earned is separated from labor input is that laborers become disincentivized. People who wish to work would simply stop working in the formal economy and maximize value capture by working in an underground economy. This creates a negative feedback cycle as fewer and fewer people take part in the formal economy (where the government can capture and redistribute their production to people who aren't). This rapidly bankrupts the scheme and turns labor into a punitive action by the state. "We need workers producing capturable value, therefore you must work" and the point of BI is quickly lost. BI advocates are unable to demonstrate why this isn't simply true and why every single time labor is disentangled from incentives the system goes bankrupt except with the vaguest possible handwaivy nonsense and pronouncements that it simply won't happen under their particular version of the scheme because of no particular reasons at all except for wishes and dreams. And then Mincome is usually brought up somewhere. BI models must account for labor drop-out, must account for how this disincentives the remaining labor pool and reduces value capture within the labor pool. "Empowering personal choice" is not a valid model. "Some will drop-out, but enough will stay." is not a model. How many, what percent? Why that percent? What's the impact of various drop-out rates on various actor models? How much does production need to increase on the remaining labor pool to maintain equilibrium? Is that achievable? What happens to purchasing power when most products become effectively free? What about maintaining growth at x,y and z percentages? If new money supply is introduced to compensate, what impact does this have on inflation? What's the delta from the best-case model to the worst-case? How are both of those extreme models justified by observed and predicted actor behavior? What compensation levers does the government have to incentivize labor participation? What's the degree of input in each and the known and/or expected outcomes? How does each lever's outputs change the previous questions output? I've never even seen so much as an Excel spreadsheet that models the simplest question I've put here. What happens when drop-out is 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 70%? Is the proposed BI scheme sustainable? Why or why not? What happens in an unsustainable system? Can unsustainable systems be "fixed" and brought back into sustainability? By what means? What happens if there's not full local/national/regional/global participation? How does the scheme compensate for imperfect participation? Has this compensation plan been modeled and tested under previously identified circumstances? If the system becomes unsustainable, what does failure look like? Can hard failures be corrected? How do we adjust to bring unskilled out-of-labor-pool people back into the labor pool in the event of a lack of sustainment and eventual failure? The modeling isn't hard, it's just tedious and it has to be done or BI will continue to be the butt of economic jokes. BI needs a body of real thought behind it, not hand-waivy well wishing. It needs a cumulative and unimpeachable story to show that it really is a better idea than the ideas we're working off of now. But BI doesn't offer any of that. It offers wishes and naive hopeful dreams of a global population suddenly achieving self-actualization all at once. It's a nice picture, but anybody can write any sort of Utopian fantasy fiction that makes any sort of crazy idea sound workable. Here's one: - We all need underwear - Let's all make underwear - I've solved supply-demand issues, monetary imbalance, underwear shortages and brought about a golden utopia for all time. The numbers must work out. Math cannot be fudged by our personal feelings. I've seen HVAC system with better planning documents than any BI scheme. It's absolutely exhausting to keep explaining this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794247

read 12y ago
Write an essay about it. You seem to understand it well enough to explain, and care enough to keep explaining in spite of how exhausting it is. You practically wrote half of the essay with that comment alone. Sort out all arguments against BI to focus the discussion and you could be onto something.
dllthomas 12y ago
'Increasingly, they will be supporting more and more people who choose not to join the pool. The percentage of money they earn that they actually get to keep will grow less and less because more of it is going out to pay for people who aren't working. Eventually, a rational actor in the labor pool will ask themselves, "why bother?", and will drop out as well. It's a vicious cycle, not a virtuous one.' There are two things this misses: 1) Some of the funding for BI may come from taxation of land or capital (in the economic factors of production sense), not just labor. 2) Inflation. As people leave the labor pool, it gets more expensive to make things. As the dollar buys less, the basic income buys less, and there is more pressure for people to get working again. "Inflation adjusted BI drawn exclusively from tax on labor" seems to be what you've considered, but it also seems to be a particularly difficult position in the space of possible policies.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
I attempted it once, more as a lead in to a monte carlo tutorial than anything else. The results were not particularly favorable to a BI. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096 The response from most of the BI supporters was approximately what you'd expect.