7 ms·

The Failure of a Past Basic Income Guarantee, the Speenhamland System

44 points by marcusgarvey 12y ago

refurb 12y ago
This article has issues (as already pointed out by others), but it raises a valid point. What would be the effects of a basic income? It refers to lower wages, which might be one. This just reminds me of other gov't efforts to "tweak" the system. A great example in the US is drug prices. Some federal gov't programs (Medicare) get to buy drugs at either discount X% or the lowest price offered (to non-gov't customers) whichever is lower. Sounds like a great idea, but what drug companies started to do is pull back their discounts on private customers in order to minimize the discount to the gov't. As the gov't started paying more, a mish-mash of "tweaks" were made to avoid this. This just created new ways for drug companies to respond. Basic income is a decent idea at first glance, but holy crap it could become a complex mess pretty quick if it's not done right. It could create some pretty perverse incentives for either individual or companies to maximize their gain.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "It refers to lower wages, which might be one." It might, but I don't see why. As some people are more able to opt out of the workforce, you're reducing the supply of labor. Meanwhile, you're making some individuals more capable of realizing their needs as demand. It would hugely surprise me if lower supply and increased demand meant a lower price. Which is not to say I couldn't be surprised. "Basic income is a decent idea at first glance, but holy crap it could become a complex mess pretty quick if it's not done right. It could create some pretty perverse incentives for either individual or companies to maximize their gain." Note that we already have a welfare system with a bunch of layers of complexity to try and coddle various behaviour out of people. A system with one simple formula and no discontinuities is likely to be substantially less weird.
rebootthesystem 12y ago
Given how HN leans due to the vast majority of members being young left-leaning idealists with little real life experience in enough cultures and environments to have a realistic world view this isn't bound to be a popular post. So be it. The human condition is such that most people devolve into pretty useless individuals once all is provided for them with no effort. Even if what is provided is not "all" this usually has negative effects. We do best when we EARN what we have. We become better people when we have to devote time, effort and treasure to achive what we want. Various forms of subsidizing life only succeed at destroying people, communities and futures. You want a country with a culture hell-bent to innovate, struggle, work hard and compete. That country will prosper and eat everyone else alive. In the US we have generations of people on the dole that have, as a result, utterly destroyed everything from individuals to cities. While I don't have any data I'd be willing to bet that recipients of huge ridiculous unearned government and union pensions are some of the most selfish people out there, just living their "no worries" life without a care in the world and without doing a thing to help others. Then you have people like me. I've had two huge business failures. One resulted in a total business and personal not-a-dime-to-my-name bankrupcy. I come from an immigrant entrepreneurial family. I licked my wounds and got back to work each and every time. And did well every time because I worked my ass off while everyone else was watching TV. Because I understood failure and struggle so well I have always gone out of my way to help those struggling. As an example, I have been working with this guy I met at three meetups here in Los Angeles for a year. He is basically homeless and sleeps at friend's homes while doing gigs here and there for money. I am not giving him a dime. I am teaching him how to start a business. We've been at it for a year. He could barely send an email when we started. Today, I fully expect him to start making $5K a month by June and up from there. Maybe what we need is safety nets for the sick and old without any family/social (church, friends) backup. The rest get nothing could qualify for something like welfare for a very limited time and only to pay for food, a place to live and education. No iphones, no satellite TV, no playstations. You have to make it such that you turn on the innate drive to problem-solve and improve your situation that exists in every single able-bodied and able-minded individual. Nobody is suggesting throwing grandma off a cliff or not helping those who simply cannot do for themselves due to illness or dire situations. Charity is important. At the same time, organizations like churches get tax free status for a reason. They ought to help people rather than build massive empires (anyone who's been to Texas knows what I mean). And, yes, businesses, entrepreneurs, might get some kind of a tax incentive to help and mentor others. I don't have any specific ideas to put forth. I know this can be abused to a ridiculous extent. I also happen to know that most tax money that goes to government is often wasted in absolutely grotesque ways. Imagine if we paid someone a couple of million dollars to build the Obamacare website properly the first time around and used the billion (or whatever, the exact number is irrelevant) to launch a massive startup funding program or some other worthy cause. Imagine if the 60 to 100 billion dollars California is going to absolutely burn building a high speed train nobody is going to use and, again, launched an entrepreneurial orgy. No, there's a lot that can be done to produce positive results before we make slaves out of people, even a little bit.
deleted 12y ago
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tomlock 12y ago
I think a flat negative income tax is the way to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax When you earn a dollar, you lose 30c of your basic income. Once your basic income is eaten up in this way, you lose 30c out of your income as tax. This means that the incentive to earn each subsequent dollar is essentially the same as the last. Of course, I'm sure someone smarter than me has a better idea of what: 1) The basic income amount will be 2) What the flat tax amount would be The idea is that this would be both a tax reform action and also a replacement of a lot of welfare programs.
Futurebot 12y ago
Ms. Smith is confused. Income "top-ups" are not a GBI. Means-tested anything are not a GBI. Using the "the Speenhamland System" as an argument against the GBI shows a serious misunderstanding of what a GBI is. For a GBI to work, it'd have to be: - national - otherwise you would get strange arbitraging behavior - unconditional - available to all adults The idea is that you get the minimum (let's say 22k a year if we started one now), then you work to get even more money. It's enough to live on. To not starve. To pay rent. If you want to live well, you try to get a job if you can. It would have to replace nearly all of the current welfare state (except maybe disability - 22k may not be enough for the seriously disabled), and not just be another program. I'm also confused about her confidence that there's "so much work to do." Automation is on the march, and will continue (I'm sure Smith is very familiar with Autor / McCaffee / Ford and friends.) Many of the jobs that one might envision (and that still exist) are jobs that no one wants to do in today's world in any case. They aren't pinnacles of dignity and pride; they're soul-crushing, meaningless, repetitive, and body-destroying. The sooner we automate them, the better. No one will miss doing them. A jobs guarantee also puts us right back in the workhouse / make work mindset. "People need a sense of purpose and social engagement. Employment provides that. History is rife with examples of the rich who fail to find a productive outlet and and whose lives were consumed by addictions or other self-destructive behavior." Yes, many people would do drugs and play lots of video games. I think it's short-sighted to believe we can stop that (and as things like VR improve, we'll probably get to the point of wireheading.) Many others would spend time with their friends, make art and music, etc. I think pre-emptively assuming that most would just be loafers is falling to the same thinking trap that has sustains ideological wonders like the Protestant work ethic and modern Social Darwninism. There are other ways to encourage "purpose." A jobs guarantee is, and will hopefully remain, a non-starter. Machines will free us from work; then we'll have to find our own purpose.
applecore 12y ago
Since the early twentieth century, the world is undergoing dramatic and unprecedented change. It's going to be very hard to extrapolate from the failure of any past system or experience into the twenty-first century.
- gerbal 12y ago
  Though, that a system like this emerged in another period of dramatic and unprecedented change suggests analogy to today.
- eru 12y ago
  Why start in the twentieth century? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Revolution And that's just two examples from Europe alone.
nhaehnle 12y ago
I find the article to be unfortunately meandering, but it contains an important question slightly more than half-way down: Why all the popular support for a Basic Income Guarantee rather than the arguably superior Job Guarantee (though the two ideas are not mutually exclusive)? The author makes some frank points that BIG advocates should take to heart. This paragraph really hits home: Too many of the fantasies about a basic income guarantee seem to revolve around a tiny minority, like the individual who will write a great novel on his stipend. Let’s be real: the overwhelming majority of people who think they might like to write a book don’t have the self-displine to do so in the absence of external pressure. And that’s before you get to the question of whether it will turn out to be good enough for anyone but the author to want to read it.
- gnaritas 12y ago
  > Why all the popular support for a Basic Income Guarantee rather than the arguably superior Job Guarantee Why the obsession with a labor based economy when the whole point of a basic income is that we're moving away from labor being needed? You can't base the distribution of resources for a society on labor when the population exceeds the necessary labor force. This puritan work ethic where you judge people by how hard they work is becoming antiquated, time to try something else. In an automated world where labor isn't of great value, people still need to be able to live meaningful lives. A job guarantee is not superior, it in fact misses the entire point of basic income.
- wmf 12y ago
  If the guaranteed jobs are make-work or "bullshit" then it seems better to just give people money. But I agree with the article that there is plenty of work that could be done (like refreshing crumbling infrastructure) if there was political will to use deficit spending to pay for it.
  - owen_griffiths 12y ago
    RE Deficit spending, not sure what country you're in, but the US Government has done $5 trillion dollars of deficit spending over the last 5 years (per year it is ranged from 500bn - 1.3 Tn). I guess you can always do more, but it hasn't exactly been austerity over here.
pbreit 12y ago
Even if it supposedly works, it seems so artificial and counter to individual freedom and responsibility that it makes no sense whatsoever given the current US constitution and the principles the country was founded upon. (yes, I understand there are a lot of things in place that fall under that umbrella)
- Retra 12y ago
  What is 'it'? Where is it in the constitution? Why are we supposed to be constrained by founders' principles?
  - programmarchy 12y ago
    Why do citizens even have a duty to obey the state? What gives the state any political authority at all?
    - Retra 12y ago
      Are you asking because you don't know, or because you think I don't know?
      - programmarchy 12y ago
        I don't know why the state has political authority, and I don't know if you know. I was asking because I thought it might be related to why we are or are not bound to the founders' principles.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    We are in fact supposed to be constrained by the constitution (at least until we amend it). But, as you asked, where in the constitution is that? Where specifically?
    - Retra 12y ago
      The constitution is supposed to represent _our_ principles, not the founders'. The fact that it does not speaks more to our failure than to their success.
learnstats2 12y ago
This article appears to confuse guaranteed income (means-tested top-up) with basic income/basic income guarantee (which you get unconditionally) One of the major criticisms made of Speenhamland (a means-tested top-up) is that pay was reduced because employers knew employees could claim it back via the state top-up. That could happen under guaranteed income, as it apparently does here, but is not relevant to basic income. Wikipedia clearly points out this difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Difference_from_guaranteed_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Difference_from_g... A very poor article.
- evanpw 12y ago
  A one-to-one means-tested top-up means that the effective tax rate on all income below the guaranteed level is 100%. That is pretty obviously a terrible idea.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  That is a very common confusion. Whenever I mention basic income and people say "That will never work, its been tried!" I ask them to explain what they think a basic income system would be like, and so far it is always some form of means tested supplemental income rather than just basic income.
  - Retra 12y ago
    A civil responsibility-tested income would be another reasonable alternative. That is, if you do your taxes, are not currently a criminal, vote in some elections, obey basic health and safety requirements, exercise responsible finances, recycle, etc.. There are lots of things worth considering along this line of thought. You are essentially being paid to be a responsible citizen. EDIT: When I said there are a lot of things worth considering, I was not advocating stupidity, but consideration. I.e., thought. For one, it wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing. Surely if you have to pay a traffic ticket, it will already be coming out of your income. But if you chose to gamble your income away and you have children to feed, why should you keep getting it?
    - 12y ago
dllthomas 12y ago
From the article: "Even though some readers call for a stipend to everyone, that simply is not going to happen, at least in terms of net results." From Wikipedia: "The authorities at Speenhamland approved a means-tested sliding-scale of wage supplements in order to mitigate the worst effects of rural poverty. Families were paid extra to top up wages to a set level according to a table." So... "basic income isn't going to happen, a priori, so I'm going to call the failure of this other system (that looks much more like what we're currently doing than like a basic income) a failure of basic income".
- SilasX 12y ago
  That is actually an insanely common tactic in political debate.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    It is. And yet... has true basic income ever been tried, anywhere? If not, the best guide we can find is to look at the closest thing to it that has so far been tried (hopefully recognizing that the example is not completely equivalent, and therefore not completely relevant). If the new idea takes into account the experience of the old, and has revisions to specifically deal with the problems that the old system encountered, then the question is whether the changes are actually going to fix the problem. (You want to avoid "We painted it orange this time, so your previous experience doesn't prove that our approach won't work!)
    - tonyarkles 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome Looks like it was tried as a 5-year experiment. I haven't looked into the details too closely though, although the statistics on Wikipedia seem relatively promising.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      The sharp drop-off of means testing is precisely the thing that a basic income is intended to fix. The example cited isn't "basic income" any more than Welfare is.
ThomPete 12y ago
The article wrongly confused unconditional income with conditional one. What proponent of basic income talk about is unconditional basic income. If you want to look at an actual basic income system look at the test results from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
WalterBright 12y ago
The math: US population - 316m, income $10,000/yr, so a basic income for all would be 3 trillion dollars. The entire federal budget for 2014 is 3 trillion.
- aetherson 12y ago
  Well, but that's kind of unimportant. So, look, suppose that we have four people in our population. Before taxes and redistribution, their incomes are $0, $50,000, $100,000, and $150,000. We want to create a more egalitarian society and basically redistribute $25,000 from the richest person to the poorest, and $10,000 from the next richest to the next poorest, so our target final incomes are: $25k, $60k, $90k, $125k We could do that just in a straightforward way, as described, in which technically the government takes in $35k and the cost of the program is $35k. Or we could do it with a GBI, giving everyone a $25k basic income, and taxing everyone including the next poorest person, so everyone's total incomes look like this: $0 + $25k - $0k = $25k $50k + $25k - $15k = $60k $100k + $25k - $35k = $90k $150k + $25k - $50k = $125k And then technically the government has taken in $100k and spent $100k instead of $35k... but everyone is exactly as rich as they were in the version where the tax was $35k. Government expenditures look bigger, but are actually the same, because a lot of the expenditures are essentially taxed down to zero. You can do this with any desired level of redistribution. You shuffle money around a lot more in a GBI system, but what matters is the amount of redistribution, not the total "expenditure." It would be admittedly hard to make the general public understand that.
- noonespecial 12y ago
  It wouldn't be 3 trillion more to provide basic income. A great deal of that $3T is already spent administering and redistributing income in all sorts of inefficient and ridiculous ways. We don't need to leap right to "a living wage" for basic income to make a huge positive difference. $2k is a huge bump to someone who was getting 0. Basic income is a hedge against a future where labor is no longer required for productivity so one rich family owns all of the factors of production in the world and wonders why everyone is too poor to buy the outputs of their robot factories.
carapace 12y ago
I normally eschew the practice of judging books by covers, but in this case I think you can judge the content by the URL and the comments here seem to back that up. The robots are taking the jobs and we are going to have to figure out what people are for (because I'm assuming we cant just throw the "excess" population into a volcano or something, and just working them for no reason is obscene.) Wendell Berry wrote a whole essay about this called, "What are people for?"
- link_22 12y ago
  Yes, this line of tought. We need to find answers for at least some existencial questions... Unfortunalley i think that massive reduction of population is imminent, either in form of war or some ebola type disease. Sure hope that singularity will happen soon enough.
- marcusgarvey 12y ago
  You're very mistaken about Naked Capitalism. Its title is ironic, it has actually been one of the staunchest critics of oligarchy & neolib policies. Check out some of their archive.
  - carapace 12y ago
    Cheers, will do.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  I'm assuming we cant just throw the "excess" population into a volcano or something Something similar was tried not so long ago and I doubt it will be the last attempt. I can think of quite a lot of people that will cheerfully sacrifice a mass of people on the altar of their basic ideology, and won't regard themselves as morally deficient for doing so.
  - carapace 12y ago
    Well, okay, lets just throw those people into a volcano. (Is that an okay ideology? Or should you throw yourself into a volcano if you believe? I for one would gladly throw all the jerks in the world into a volcano and jump in myself afterward as I feel it would be worth it to be immortalized forever as the Last Asshole on Earth. Then you all could get on with your lives in peace and harmony. I expect life would be rather pleasant. I mean, can you even imagine it? A world with no assholes? Sure the four or five people left would be pretty lonely but at least there wouldn't be a littering anymore, eh?)

44 points by marcusgarvey 12y ago

This article has issues (as already pointed out by others), but it raises a valid point. What would be the effects of a basic income? It refers to lower wages, which might be one. This just reminds me of other gov't efforts to "tweak" the system. A great example in the US is drug prices. Some federal gov't programs (Medicare) get to buy drugs at either discount X% or the lowest price offered (to non-gov't customers) whichever is lower. Sounds like a great idea, but what drug companies started to do is pull back their discounts on private customers in order to minimize the discount to the gov't. As the gov't started paying more, a mish-mash of "tweaks" were made to avoid this. This just created new ways for drug companies to respond. Basic income is a decent idea at first glance, but holy crap it could become a complex mess pretty quick if it's not done right. It could create some pretty perverse incentives for either individual or companies to maximize their gain.

dllthomas 12y ago
"It refers to lower wages, which might be one." It might, but I don't see why. As some people are more able to opt out of the workforce, you're reducing the supply of labor. Meanwhile, you're making some individuals more capable of realizing their needs as demand. It would hugely surprise me if lower supply and increased demand meant a lower price. Which is not to say I couldn't be surprised. "Basic income is a decent idea at first glance, but holy crap it could become a complex mess pretty quick if it's not done right. It could create some pretty perverse incentives for either individual or companies to maximize their gain." Note that we already have a welfare system with a bunch of layers of complexity to try and coddle various behaviour out of people. A system with one simple formula and no discontinuities is likely to be substantially less weird.

rebootthesystem 12y ago

Given how HN leans due to the vast majority of members being young left-leaning idealists with little real life experience in enough cultures and environments to have a realistic world view this isn't bound to be a popular post. So be it. The human condition is such that most people devolve into pretty useless individuals once all is provided for them with no effort. Even if what is provided is not "all" this usually has negative effects. We do best when we EARN what we have. We become better people when we have to devote time, effort and treasure to achive what we want. Various forms of subsidizing life only succeed at destroying people, communities and futures. You want a country with a culture hell-bent to innovate, struggle, work hard and compete. That country will prosper and eat everyone else alive. In the US we have generations of people on the dole that have, as a result, utterly destroyed everything from individuals to cities. While I don't have any data I'd be willing to bet that recipients of huge ridiculous unearned government and union pensions are some of the most selfish people out there, just living their "no worries" life without a care in the world and without doing a thing to help others. Then you have people like me. I've had two huge business failures. One resulted in a total business and personal not-a-dime-to-my-name bankrupcy. I come from an immigrant entrepreneurial family. I licked my wounds and got back to work each and every time. And did well every time because I worked my ass off while everyone else was watching TV. Because I understood failure and struggle so well I have always gone out of my way to help those struggling. As an example, I have been working with this guy I met at three meetups here in Los Angeles for a year. He is basically homeless and sleeps at friend's homes while doing gigs here and there for money. I am not giving him a dime. I am teaching him how to start a business. We've been at it for a year. He could barely send an email when we started. Today, I fully expect him to start making $5K a month by June and up from there. Maybe what we need is safety nets for the sick and old without any family/social (church, friends) backup. The rest get nothing could qualify for something like welfare for a very limited time and only to pay for food, a place to live and education. No iphones, no satellite TV, no playstations. You have to make it such that you turn on the innate drive to problem-solve and improve your situation that exists in every single able-bodied and able-minded individual. Nobody is suggesting throwing grandma off a cliff or not helping those who simply cannot do for themselves due to illness or dire situations. Charity is important. At the same time, organizations like churches get tax free status for a reason. They ought to help people rather than build massive empires (anyone who's been to Texas knows what I mean). And, yes, businesses, entrepreneurs, might get some kind of a tax incentive to help and mentor others. I don't have any specific ideas to put forth. I know this can be abused to a ridiculous extent. I also happen to know that most tax money that goes to government is often wasted in absolutely grotesque ways. Imagine if we paid someone a couple of million dollars to build the Obamacare website properly the first time around and used the billion (or whatever, the exact number is irrelevant) to launch a massive startup funding program or some other worthy cause. Imagine if the 60 to 100 billion dollars California is going to absolutely burn building a high speed train nobody is going to use and, again, launched an entrepreneurial orgy. No, there's a lot that can be done to produce positive results before we make slaves out of people, even a little bit.

deleted 12y ago

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tomlock 12y ago

I think a flat negative income tax is the way to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax When you earn a dollar, you lose 30c of your basic income. Once your basic income is eaten up in this way, you lose 30c out of your income as tax. This means that the incentive to earn each subsequent dollar is essentially the same as the last. Of course, I'm sure someone smarter than me has a better idea of what: 1) The basic income amount will be 2) What the flat tax amount would be The idea is that this would be both a tax reform action and also a replacement of a lot of welfare programs.

Futurebot 12y ago

Ms. Smith is confused. Income "top-ups" are not a GBI. Means-tested anything are not a GBI. Using the "the Speenhamland System" as an argument against the GBI shows a serious misunderstanding of what a GBI is. For a GBI to work, it'd have to be: - national - otherwise you would get strange arbitraging behavior - unconditional - available to all adults The idea is that you get the minimum (let's say 22k a year if we started one now), then you work to get even more money. It's enough to live on. To not starve. To pay rent. If you want to live well, you try to get a job if you can. It would have to replace nearly all of the current welfare state (except maybe disability - 22k may not be enough for the seriously disabled), and not just be another program. I'm also confused about her confidence that there's "so much work to do." Automation is on the march, and will continue (I'm sure Smith is very familiar with Autor / McCaffee / Ford and friends.) Many of the jobs that one might envision (and that still exist) are jobs that no one wants to do in today's world in any case. They aren't pinnacles of dignity and pride; they're soul-crushing, meaningless, repetitive, and body-destroying. The sooner we automate them, the better. No one will miss doing them. A jobs guarantee also puts us right back in the workhouse / make work mindset. "People need a sense of purpose and social engagement. Employment provides that. History is rife with examples of the rich who fail to find a productive outlet and and whose lives were consumed by addictions or other self-destructive behavior." Yes, many people would do drugs and play lots of video games. I think it's short-sighted to believe we can stop that (and as things like VR improve, we'll probably get to the point of wireheading.) Many others would spend time with their friends, make art and music, etc. I think pre-emptively assuming that most would just be loafers is falling to the same thinking trap that has sustains ideological wonders like the Protestant work ethic and modern Social Darwninism. There are other ways to encourage "purpose." A jobs guarantee is, and will hopefully remain, a non-starter. Machines will free us from work; then we'll have to find our own purpose.

applecore 12y ago

Since the early twentieth century, the world is undergoing dramatic and unprecedented change. It's going to be very hard to extrapolate from the failure of any past system or experience into the twenty-first century.

gerbal 12y ago
Though, that a system like this emerged in another period of dramatic and unprecedented change suggests analogy to today.
eru 12y ago
Why start in the twentieth century? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Revolution And that's just two examples from Europe alone.

nhaehnle 12y ago

I find the article to be unfortunately meandering, but it contains an important question slightly more than half-way down: Why all the popular support for a Basic Income Guarantee rather than the arguably superior Job Guarantee (though the two ideas are not mutually exclusive)? The author makes some frank points that BIG advocates should take to heart. This paragraph really hits home: Too many of the fantasies about a basic income guarantee seem to revolve around a tiny minority, like the individual who will write a great novel on his stipend. Let’s be real: the overwhelming majority of people who think they might like to write a book don’t have the self-displine to do so in the absence of external pressure. And that’s before you get to the question of whether it will turn out to be good enough for anyone but the author to want to read it.

gnaritas 12y ago
> Why all the popular support for a Basic Income Guarantee rather than the arguably superior Job Guarantee Why the obsession with a labor based economy when the whole point of a basic income is that we're moving away from labor being needed? You can't base the distribution of resources for a society on labor when the population exceeds the necessary labor force. This puritan work ethic where you judge people by how hard they work is becoming antiquated, time to try something else. In an automated world where labor isn't of great value, people still need to be able to live meaningful lives. A job guarantee is not superior, it in fact misses the entire point of basic income.
wmf 12y ago
If the guaranteed jobs are make-work or "bullshit" then it seems better to just give people money. But I agree with the article that there is plenty of work that could be done (like refreshing crumbling infrastructure) if there was political will to use deficit spending to pay for it.
- owen_griffiths 12y ago
  RE Deficit spending, not sure what country you're in, but the US Government has done $5 trillion dollars of deficit spending over the last 5 years (per year it is ranged from 500bn - 1.3 Tn). I guess you can always do more, but it hasn't exactly been austerity over here.

pbreit 12y ago

Even if it supposedly works, it seems so artificial and counter to individual freedom and responsibility that it makes no sense whatsoever given the current US constitution and the principles the country was founded upon. (yes, I understand there are a lot of things in place that fall under that umbrella)

Retra 12y ago
What is 'it'? Where is it in the constitution? Why are we supposed to be constrained by founders' principles?
- programmarchy 12y ago
  Why do citizens even have a duty to obey the state? What gives the state any political authority at all?
  - Retra 12y ago
    Are you asking because you don't know, or because you think I don't know?
    - programmarchy 12y ago
      I don't know why the state has political authority, and I don't know if you know. I was asking because I thought it might be related to why we are or are not bound to the founders' principles.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  We are in fact supposed to be constrained by the constitution (at least until we amend it). But, as you asked, where in the constitution is that? Where specifically?
  - Retra 12y ago
    The constitution is supposed to represent _our_ principles, not the founders'. The fact that it does not speaks more to our failure than to their success.

learnstats2 12y ago

This article appears to confuse guaranteed income (means-tested top-up) with basic income/basic income guarantee (which you get unconditionally) One of the major criticisms made of Speenhamland (a means-tested top-up) is that pay was reduced because employers knew employees could claim it back via the state top-up. That could happen under guaranteed income, as it apparently does here, but is not relevant to basic income. Wikipedia clearly points out this difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Difference_from_guaranteed_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Difference_from_g... A very poor article.

evanpw 12y ago
A one-to-one means-tested top-up means that the effective tax rate on all income below the guaranteed level is 100%. That is pretty obviously a terrible idea.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
That is a very common confusion. Whenever I mention basic income and people say "That will never work, its been tried!" I ask them to explain what they think a basic income system would be like, and so far it is always some form of means tested supplemental income rather than just basic income.
- Retra 12y ago
  A civil responsibility-tested income would be another reasonable alternative. That is, if you do your taxes, are not currently a criminal, vote in some elections, obey basic health and safety requirements, exercise responsible finances, recycle, etc.. There are lots of things worth considering along this line of thought. You are essentially being paid to be a responsible citizen. EDIT: When I said there are a lot of things worth considering, I was not advocating stupidity, but consideration. I.e., thought. For one, it wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing. Surely if you have to pay a traffic ticket, it will already be coming out of your income. But if you chose to gamble your income away and you have children to feed, why should you keep getting it?
  - 12y ago

dllthomas 12y ago

From the article: "Even though some readers call for a stipend to everyone, that simply is not going to happen, at least in terms of net results." From Wikipedia: "The authorities at Speenhamland approved a means-tested sliding-scale of wage supplements in order to mitigate the worst effects of rural poverty. Families were paid extra to top up wages to a set level according to a table." So... "basic income isn't going to happen, a priori, so I'm going to call the failure of this other system (that looks much more like what we're currently doing than like a basic income) a failure of basic income".

SilasX 12y ago
That is actually an insanely common tactic in political debate.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  It is. And yet... has true basic income ever been tried, anywhere? If not, the best guide we can find is to look at the closest thing to it that has so far been tried (hopefully recognizing that the example is not completely equivalent, and therefore not completely relevant). If the new idea takes into account the experience of the old, and has revisions to specifically deal with the problems that the old system encountered, then the question is whether the changes are actually going to fix the problem. (You want to avoid "We painted it orange this time, so your previous experience doesn't prove that our approach won't work!)
  - tonyarkles 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome Looks like it was tried as a 5-year experiment. I haven't looked into the details too closely though, although the statistics on Wikipedia seem relatively promising.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    The sharp drop-off of means testing is precisely the thing that a basic income is intended to fix. The example cited isn't "basic income" any more than Welfare is.

ThomPete 12y ago

The article wrongly confused unconditional income with conditional one. What proponent of basic income talk about is unconditional basic income. If you want to look at an actual basic income system look at the test results from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

WalterBright 12y ago

The math: US population - 316m, income $10,000/yr, so a basic income for all would be 3 trillion dollars. The entire federal budget for 2014 is 3 trillion.

aetherson 12y ago
Well, but that's kind of unimportant. So, look, suppose that we have four people in our population. Before taxes and redistribution, their incomes are $0, $50,000, $100,000, and $150,000. We want to create a more egalitarian society and basically redistribute $25,000 from the richest person to the poorest, and $10,000 from the next richest to the next poorest, so our target final incomes are: $25k, $60k, $90k, $125k We could do that just in a straightforward way, as described, in which technically the government takes in $35k and the cost of the program is $35k. Or we could do it with a GBI, giving everyone a $25k basic income, and taxing everyone including the next poorest person, so everyone's total incomes look like this: $0 + $25k - $0k = $25k $50k + $25k - $15k = $60k $100k + $25k - $35k = $90k $150k + $25k - $50k = $125k And then technically the government has taken in $100k and spent $100k instead of $35k... but everyone is exactly as rich as they were in the version where the tax was $35k. Government expenditures look bigger, but are actually the same, because a lot of the expenditures are essentially taxed down to zero. You can do this with any desired level of redistribution. You shuffle money around a lot more in a GBI system, but what matters is the amount of redistribution, not the total "expenditure." It would be admittedly hard to make the general public understand that.
noonespecial 12y ago
It wouldn't be 3 trillion more to provide basic income. A great deal of that $3T is already spent administering and redistributing income in all sorts of inefficient and ridiculous ways. We don't need to leap right to "a living wage" for basic income to make a huge positive difference. $2k is a huge bump to someone who was getting 0. Basic income is a hedge against a future where labor is no longer required for productivity so one rich family owns all of the factors of production in the world and wonders why everyone is too poor to buy the outputs of their robot factories.

carapace 12y ago

I normally eschew the practice of judging books by covers, but in this case I think you can judge the content by the URL and the comments here seem to back that up. The robots are taking the jobs and we are going to have to figure out what people are for (because I'm assuming we cant just throw the "excess" population into a volcano or something, and just working them for no reason is obscene.) Wendell Berry wrote a whole essay about this called, "What are people for?"

link_22 12y ago
Yes, this line of tought. We need to find answers for at least some existencial questions... Unfortunalley i think that massive reduction of population is imminent, either in form of war or some ebola type disease. Sure hope that singularity will happen soon enough.
marcusgarvey 12y ago
You're very mistaken about Naked Capitalism. Its title is ironic, it has actually been one of the staunchest critics of oligarchy & neolib policies. Check out some of their archive.
- carapace 12y ago
  Cheers, will do.
anigbrowl 12y ago
I'm assuming we cant just throw the "excess" population into a volcano or something Something similar was tried not so long ago and I doubt it will be the last attempt. I can think of quite a lot of people that will cheerfully sacrifice a mass of people on the altar of their basic ideology, and won't regard themselves as morally deficient for doing so.
- carapace 12y ago
  Well, okay, lets just throw those people into a volcano. (Is that an okay ideology? Or should you throw yourself into a volcano if you believe? I for one would gladly throw all the jerks in the world into a volcano and jump in myself afterward as I feel it would be worth it to be immortalized forever as the Last Asshole on Earth. Then you all could get on with your lives in peace and harmony. I expect life would be rather pleasant. I mean, can you even imagine it? A world with no assholes? Sure the four or five people left would be pretty lonely but at least there wouldn't be a littering anymore, eh?)