VC Firm Y Combinator Launches an Experiment In Universal Basic Income (fastcoexist.com)

New submitter Gordon_Shure writes: Silicon Valley startup financer Y Combinator, remembered for successes like Airbnb and Dropbox, is launching an experiment to give people a Universal Basic Income. At present, the plan is for hundreds of participants to get repeated cash payments unconditionally. Then, assessors will record life consequences like changes in work patterns, self-employment, artistic endeavors, or idleness.

Recent focus on UBI in Finland, Switzerland and other countries see proponents claim a basic income will — in a world facing structural unemployment due to jobs taken by automated AI, robotics and machines — combat poverty and work insecurity. Others remain unconvinced. What do you think about the significance of what this kind of small-population study would show?

Comments

Interesting

[KermodeBear]

An interesting experiment, to be sure, and I'm glad that someone has the money to try it out.

It's hard to know until you're actually in the situation, of course, but I think that if I had a minimum income in addition to what I make now, I'd drop down to working part time and spend the balance volunteering and pursuing music again.

Re:Interesting

[ArmoredDragon]

As somebody who is very heavily opposed to communism and socialism, I'm interested in seeing the results of UBI (which is neither communism nor socialism, rather just a form of welfare) however I wouldn't want it anywhere I plan to live anytime soon, because it's one of those things where once you have it, it's practically impossible to take away, no matter what kinds of problems it creates or doesn't actually solve.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a temporary study, so here's my prediction:

People currently living beyond their means will continue to live beyond their elevated means.
People capable of affording their current lifestyle will invest the additional income.
People who tend to make bad decisions will quit their jobs and pursue fame by some manner. Any success in this group will be seen as a strong argument for the UBI even if it proves to be statistically consistent with other people who drop their lives to pursue fame.

Re:Interesting

[pr0t0]

I'd drop down to working part time

While filling the remaining time with volunteering and strengthening the arts is noble, maybe even desirable in some sense; I'm guessing this modification to your work schedule is precisely why the UBI would fail on a larger scale...at least in the United States. It would seem to me the only way, or maybe just the best way, to judge it as a success is if not much else changed beyond lowering the costs of supporting those who cannot support themselves.

If a reduction in workforce productivity coincides with the UBI, a claim will be made that humans are lazy and will not work if they don't have to. Maybe they are correct. It was certainly the claim as to why Communism, or maybe Marxist Socialism, was or would be an inevitable failure. I'm not an economist, so my opinion on the matter is largely uninformed.

The UBI is interesting in principle, particularly if lowering the costs of supporting those who cannot support themselves can be achieved. If a measure of dignity and self-sufficiency can be returned to those people as well, all the better.

I personally wouldn't change my life at all.

Re:Interesting

[BitZtream]

Not really all the interesting.

In any economy you do this in that isn't already under tight controls ... the economy experiences an inflation period that effectively consumes the UBI payment and now people are worse off than they were before.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody who is very heavily opposed to communism and socialism, I'm interested in seeing the results of UBI (which is neither communism nor socialism, rather just a form of welfare)

Your idea of what socialism is might be a bit different compared to what everyone else means when they say that word.

Finland is considered to be a socialism, yet they haven't even gotten around to implement UBI yet. Clearly everyone else thinks of something less severe when they say socialism compared to what you are thinking of.

Regardless I find these studies interesting, but I think the Finnish experiment with it will lead to more useful information.
I would imagine only having a small subset of a population on basic income could lead to dynamics that wouldn't occur wit ha universal system.

Re:Interesting

[ShanghaiBill]

now people are worse off than they were before.

In aggregate, this would almost certainly be true. But UBI is not supposed to create wealth, it is supposed to redistribute it. The "losers" would be people that work and pay taxes. The "winners" would be people that don't. So inequality would be reduced, at the cost of lower production through reduced incentives. But is the reduction in inequality enough to justify the reduction in productivity, especially when compared to alternatives like EITC? We don't know, and that is what this experiment is designed to find out.

Re:Interesting

[bondsbw]

People who tend to make bad decisions will quit their jobs and pursue fame by some manner. Any success in this group will be seen as a strong argument for the UBI even if it proves to be statistically consistent with other people who drop their lives to pursue fame.

If you replace the word "fame" with "success" (because seeking fame is much less universal than seeking success in life), isn't this the point of the safety net provided by UBI?

So yes it is interesting, but not invalid. Other interesting aspects:
- The percentage of failures and what kind of failures from those who take on risks, as compared with non-UBI
- The overall economic growth and stability of this group, as compared with non-UBI

Of course these must be controlled for various biases that come with such a study.

Re:Interesting

[BarbaraHudson]

People dropping down to part-time work will increase demand for other people to fill in the gaps. It's better to have two people working part-time than one full-time and one idle, and the financial cost is the same either way.

With all the productivity gains in the last 45 years, we should be down to a 16-hour work week if the increases were divided equitably between employers and employees. So, since that didn't happen voluntarily, looks like the invisible hand is going to impose it on businesses whether they like it or not :-)

Re:Interesting

[Forgefather]

I'm not entirely convinced that the number of net work hours will even decrease. It is an interesting experiment, and I will hypothesize that the results will be determined by the financial state of the person that started receiving the UBI. I think that the largest change in behavior will come from people in the middle to lower income levels. People with very little income level will most likely have most of the money consumed simply escaping debt, which is usually what has them locked into lower income levels while the middle class will see the most change.

I predict that most of the middle of the road people who show up for a paycheck will cut back on hours worked during the day while most of the 'doers' will increase their average time worked. I feel that with more security on the financial side the people who are more naturally inclined to take risks and push the envelope will lose the largest disincentive to making a startup in their financial insecurity in the event of failure. Thus I predict certain groups will end up working even more hours than they were before because many people today work for reasons other than a paycheck.

Regardless of number of hours worked I feel that this move will have significant upward pressure on wages. With people cutting back hours due to disinterest there will be a decrease in the supply of labor and most of all UBI gives every single person bargaining power in terms of salary. For people of all income levels having an income that gives you the time and luxury to find a good job with a good salary gives you tremendous advantage in salary negotiations, which, properly leveraged, can translate to salary increases even in what were traditionally minimum wage jobs. Who wants to slave behind a cash register for 8 dollars an hour when they aren't desperate to feed their kids?

In the end the question will be whether those that choose to make do with the basic income can be supported by the the ones that choose to work, but the idea can certainly generate benefit for everyone involved through increased wages and a decreased number of people who show up to fill a seat.

Re:Interesting

[tlhIngan]

As somebody who is very heavily opposed to communism and socialism, I'm interested in seeing the results of UBI (which is neither communism nor socialism, rather just a form of welfare) however I wouldn't want it anywhere I plan to live anytime soon, because it's one of those things where once you have it, it's practically impossible to take away, no matter what kinds of problems it creates or doesn't actually solve.

You do realize you're paying for other people's laziness/unemployability all the time, right?

Anytime any politician says "We will cut back benefits to the lazy and all that" it's really code for "We, the 1%, want to pay less taxes supporting your sorry asses". Because the homeless won't suddenly decide that because their government benefits are cut back, they will suddenly work. A lot of homeless ARE working - they don't make enough to pay for rent, food and other necessities. The ones that aren't, are generally unemployable - mental illness, drugs, alcohol or other problems keep them from holding even the most basic of jobs.

These people will not magically become productive members of society by cutting benefits. The working poor won't magically get better paying jobs (in fact, they'd likely lose their existing jobs), the mentally ill will not become employable (they need medical treatment, but they can't pay for that), etc.

Instead, those people will just become what the desperate do - steal/rob for the money and basic necessities they need. So instead of paying for their support through taxes, you're paying for them through increased crime, increased prices as stores have to cope with more shrinkage, increased security, etc. And yes, you can jail them - pay for more police officers, more courts, more jails. And medical bills - medical treatment inside the ER is the most expensive treatment option available - and the only one available, so you pay through increased insurance premiums helping people who can't pay at all for some of the most expensive medical treatment available.

Yes, it's all well and good to "be responsible" and "take care of yourself" and all that, but there will always be a segment of society that can't or won't. And it's either pay through taxes to take care of them, or abandon them and pay through other societal costs.

The only real question is - will basic income be done right? Because the basic income gets you basically very little - accomodations inside a large barracks-style room (you get a locker for your stuff, but that's it - you sleep with 8/16 other people at night), shared washroom facilities and entertainment, and 3 basic nutritionally complete meals a day.

That's what it really pays for - the absolute basics with very little discretionary money left over. Enough to live on, and for a few people, positively all they really need. If you want more spending money so you can live in more private accommodations, eat better food, have cash to pursue a hobby or anything else, then you need to do something to make extra money.

Sure, a few people will be happy to lounge around with the basics - that's fine. But a lot more people will want to improve their lot in life - I mean barracks style living only appeals so much.

Really, what happens is basic income transforms work from a necessity of survival (you can count having to steal or mug people as an occupation those without jobs have to do to survive), to a means to improve yourself. Eventually people want to have a private bathroom in their living arrangements, or private laundry, or watch more than just OTA TV, etc. So you work as much as you need to feel satisfied.

And it's sort of essential as robots and everything takes over - because those people whose jobs have been displaced aren't going to be able to find new replacement jobs no matter how much extra training they do.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference between a fascist dictatorship and socialism, yet a lot of people seem to get them mixed up.

Re:Interesting

[amRadioHed]

it's one of those things where once you have it, it's practically impossible to take away, no matter what kinds of problems it creates or doesn't actually solve

That describes pretty much any political or economic system.

Re:Interesting

[amiga3D]

Someone always has to run off the cliff every time.

Re:Interesting

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Why do we need all these workers? We're reaching the point where some factories are coming back from China, because it's a 100 person job in China, or 4 + robots in America.

The ideal is if there isn't enough work for everyone to bother themselves with a 40-hr work week.

Re:Interesting

[justthinkit]

As somebody who is very heavily opposed to communism and socialism

This is exactly why this is being trialed...to soften people up to communism.

Imagine what comes next after we collectively embrace communism.

<img src="84_mac_ad_in_r3v3rs3.jpg"

Re:Interesting

[AmiMoJo]

We are going to have to reduce our working hours as automation means there is less and less work to do. It's also better for individuals to work a bit less and for the company to just hire more people.

Where it tends to break down is with small companies where there might only be one or two programmers, for example. There are solutions, like tax breaks.

The countries that are trying this are ones that value quality of life a bit higher than corporate profits, and not coincidentally are also pretty well off.

Re: Interesting

[maple_shaft]

Despite the fact that the elephant in the room that macro economists are scared to death of is the drop in demand for goods and services in a mature economy. This causes natural deflation in a free market void of central bank interference. Japan for the first time is offering negative interest rates, a country that struggled with dropping consumer demand for decades. We are seeing the same things in the US and other countries where central banks are practically giving money for free with the hopes that it will trigger investment and demand. That and quantitative easing and creating new money out of thin air yet runaway inflation STILL does not occur! Most people work just hard enough to make just enough money to live a comfortable life with a few luxuries, but with productivity at record levels, not only do we have less and less need for productive workers for capitalists to make money, things that we have today that 40 years ago were toys of the rich are now common and cheap for the masses. Demand for more and more sophisticated luxuries is not continuous, it tapers off for most healthy functioning adults. This is clearly true or marketing services wouldn't be a billion dollar industry, using psychological tricks to convince people of needs that they don't have. This is only sustainable for only so long before we realize that demand cannot increase forever, constant growth cannot be sustained, and the value of human labor is approaching zero with productivity and automation gains. Universal income will not cause inflation as food and necessities on the supply side already surpass the possible demand from the population as a whole. With needs, we don't demand more food when our bellies are full, we don't demand additional homes and healthcare than what is necessary for us to stay alive. Everything else is a luxury and is a want not a need but in most people wants are limited too without psychological tricks. UBI will clearly not cause inflation, it is a necessary step towards a post consumer economy and society.

Re:Interesting

[tricorn]

A Basic Income doesn't have to be "barracks-style living". My thinking on a UBI is something on the order of $2000/month. Sure, in some places that won't get you much, in others you'll be quite comfortable. Yet, how many people here yearn to live on $24K/year and wouldn't take a job (if available) to improve your condition?

Re:Interesting

[Kjella]

In aggregate, this would almost certainly be true. But UBI is not supposed to create wealth, it is supposed to redistribute it. The "losers" would be people that work and pay taxes. The "winners" would be people that don't. So inequality would be reduced, at the cost of lower production through reduced incentives. But is the reduction in inequality enough to justify the reduction in productivity, especially when compared to alternatives like EITC? We don't know, and that is what this experiment is designed to find out.

Actually if it's really to replace other welfare services the biggest losers would probably be those that genuinely need the disability benefits, because the UBI has to be tuned real low so all the minimum wage people don't all quit. Ordinary people might depend on UBI from time to time then do seasonal work or part time or work full time for a while when they feel the cash is short. But if you're really not in a condition to work and that's how your next 30 years will look like it'd be really depressive.

Re:Interesting

[monkeyxpress]

It's a temporary study, so here's my prediction:

People currently living beyond their means will continue to live beyond their elevated means.

What does this even mean when you have a global economy with surplus capacity? Machines/People are sitting around not making stuff because those living within their means just want to save, and those living beyond their means are being told not to borrow the money those living within their means are desperate trying to shove into their bank accounts through the finance industry. An entire economy can't save for next year's harvest by hoarding piles of green paper.

People capable of affording their current lifestyle will invest the additional income.

By desperately trying to find someone to borrow the money off them, even though negative real interest rates would suggest you ain't going to find any takers.

People who tend to make bad decisions will quit their jobs and pursue fame by some manner. Any success in this group will be seen as a strong argument for the UBI even if it proves to be statistically consistent with other people who drop their lives to pursue fame.

As opposed to doing a job we could easily automate but won't because those of us who still have utility value ensure (through housing benefits, tax credits) that subsistence level humans can out compete robots for all the rubbish jobs.

I'm not a fan of lazy people. But I don't think it makes sense to have them do jobs that robots could do under the threat of starvation, simply so that I can feel better about some kind of puritan work ethic that was beaten into me as a child.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize the entire left-right paradigm is essentially a fallacy when analyzed to any depth?

Re:Interesting

[swb]

While filling the remaining time with volunteering and strengthening the arts is noble, maybe even desirable in some sense; I'm guessing this modification to your work schedule is precisely why the UBI would fail on a larger scale..

How many additional people engaged in volunteer work does it take to make significant improvements in community well being that government could never achieve?

And by volunteering, I don't mean that bullshit volunteering that passes for community involvement at the corporate level -- bagging rice and beans for giveaway meals wearing team t-shirts doesn't count.

I'm thinking of like neighbors who volunteer to overhaul a playground. A lot of community parks in my city are in crappy shape, with equipment in poor repair, peeling paint, etc. Labor is the most significant element of this task and it wouldn't take much in terms of skill to fix up park equipment.

Hell, if the goddamn materials were even available at a discount, I'd volunteer to patch the countless residential potholes in my neighborhood that are never adequately patched.

How about helping people revise resumes and give them career counseling? That's a direct benefit that gets people into productive work that's difficult to get from any government employment program.

I think there's all manner of useful work that volunteers could do that would cost many multiples if done by the usual government mechanisms. It doesn't get done now because those mechanisms have become so expensive and "government spending" is so hated.

Re:Interesting

[phantomfive]

The only real question is - will basic income be done right?

Most likely no. Especially given how little data we have on the subject.

Re:Interesting

[monkeyxpress]

I get your point, but I think UBI needs to be able to become something much more than a subsistence payment. Just break it down to a materials utilisation perspective - a humanoid robot might use 100kg of steel, copper and silicon. It could lasts for maybe 50+ years, work in -10-50C temperatures 24 hours a day, uses a couple square meters of solar panels for power, and medical care is a few spare parts from a 3D printer. A human needs a house, land to grow crops, entertainment space, heat and lighting, expensive medical procedures and might have a useful working life of 40 years while taking 20 years to build a new one. Robots will also get faster and more accurate, while humans are probably pretty much topped out at this point.

Humans won't be able to compete with that. We need a system that will allow a considerable number of displaced people to participate in the economy when their labour has no value and it will be tragic if they are housed in subsistence level conditions while we have robots idling due to lack of demand. To be honest, we are not far off having such a situation right now.

Re: Interesting

[jovius]

One reason to create a basic income system in Finland is that it would hugely simplify the present welfare and subsidy system. At the moment it's a complex mix of overlapping conditions and separate paper work for different offices, even though things are pretty well paperless and electronic.

In essence, basic income would mean lighter government and less stress for people, who would for even a short while drop out of employment, or who have a varied mix of employment and other activities, such as freelancing.

Besides, the amount of basic income equals more or less with the fixed period subsidy one can get when founding a company (sort of a welfare system for entrepreneurs, who in the present system wouldn't be eligible for any other support). That could be completely scratched, as well as student housing and living benefits. With the UBI in place one wouldn't have to mind conditions on earning while being a student or unemployed, so to speak.

In essence, UBI would greatly ease the lives of a great number of people, and make the system more dynamic. Of course a number of people would still free ride on it, but that happens even now. I'd say the number would go a bit down. If one needs more money the employers are still there.

In the end it all comes to an individual's wish what to do with one's life, and what's the necessary level of income to support that. If UBI can empower people to work on those wishes and have more choice about their lives it would benefit the society at large.

Re:Interesting

[alvinrod]

That's a lot of money for a UBI as it works out to about a $12 hourly wage, which is more than a lot of people already make. A UBI should be enough that a person can get by without starving. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where you can easily get by on $700 a month. Add in another $700 from having a roommate or a partner and that's plenty of money. If you want to live off of that in a big city, maybe it means you need to have more roommates, but that's the price of living in an area with higher costs.

Re:Interesting

[jedidiah]

You mean large standing armies... yeah kind of.

Roads represent a natural monopoly. They also represent an area where there have been well documented historical abuses. You should only go full retard when it's necessary. You should not start out going full retard.

This is the difference between communists and the rest of us. You think that the government is the solution to try FIRST regardless of how many bad examples we might have of that practice.

Imposing a government monopoly should be the ABSOLUTE LAST option you try after everything else has failed.

The same idiots and thieves that you can't trust to run their own lives are the ones running the government.

Re:Interesting

[SoftwareArtist]

The question is whether it actually would reduce productivity. The summary mentions "a world facing structural unemployment due to jobs taken by automated AI, robotics and machines." If you believe (as I do, and as the people behind this study clearly do) that we're heading toward a world where productivity isn't driven by human labor, we'd better start figuring out how to support all those people who won't be needed to maintain productivity.

Besides, there are many kinds of "productivity", and economists are much better at measuring some than others. A parent who stays home to raise their children may be contributing far more to society than if they were running a cash register at the grocery. But conventional economic measures only include the latter while ignoring the former.

Re:Interesting

[duckintheface]

The original definition of Marxist Socialism involves state ownership of the means of production. The nordic counties used to be socialist but that ended in the 1980s (I lived in Sweden at the time). France is the most socialist country in Western Europe. The social democracies of Europe (like Bernie's democratic socialism) do not involve the state owning production.

If you want to use the looser definition of socialism often employed in the US (transfer of wealth from top to bottom) then every government that has ever existed is socialist. So that's not a useful defintion.

Re:Interesting

[SoftwareArtist]

If you give more money to some people, that certainly has to come from somewhere. The question is where. One option is to set it super low, below what people on social security or disability currently get, and fund it entirely by taking money away from those people. Another option is to set it a bit higher, comparable to current social security levels, and make up the difference through increased taxes on the rich. Either one of those could happen. Which one actually happens is a political choice.

I've actually tried to calculate this. If you just take all the current benefits that would be replaced by UBI (social security, standard deduction, welfare, etc.) and spread that money evenly over the whole population, I estimate it would come out to about $6000 per person per year. That's not enough to live on, though it is a significant part. For comparison, the poverty limit is currently about $12,000. So if we really wanted this to be enough to survive on, we would need some additional money that would have to come from the rich, not the poor.

Re:Interesting

[jedidiah]

That's the problem with social welfare in general.

There's always a Tory lurking around the corner waiting to trash your little Utopia.

Then your perfect little system gets corrupted and distorted and is no longer any better than what got replaced. It's likely FAR worse. Except now it's some government entrenched monopoly. The proles may even desperately clutch onto it despite having no real reason to.

Re:Interesting

[YrWrstNtmr]

And this $2000/month comes from...where?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"rather just a form of welfare"

Actually, UBI is rather unlike welfare in that it's a basic income provided to ALL. UBI is like a big check cut to EVERYONE, regardless of income. So if I make 150,000 a year, I get that UBI money the same as someone who is unemployed, or is making 40,000 a year. The only difference being that the taxes to help fund that UBI are in part coming from me more than they are from the person making 40,000 a year. But if I lose my job, that UBI is still there.

As soon as you take a UBI and say you need to qualify for it, it's no longer a UNIVERSAL Basic Income. It is, like you mention, welfare. And you're defeating the purpose.

Re:Interesting

[Dragonslicer]

And this $2000/month comes from...where?

Mostly from things like Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps - all programs that would be eliminated/replaced by a basic income. As the previous poster described in depth, a good chunk of it also comes from lower police, prison, and emergency medical costs.

Re:Interesting

[GameboyRMH]

Ah, the "rising tide causes inflation" idea, which is incompatible with any existing theory of how inflation works. I've even seen some people suggest that increased minimum wages would trigger the same effect. According to this idea, it seems that the only force keeping inflation in check is the desperation of underpaid workers.

Re:Interesting

[MitchDev]

Pipe dream in other words.

Re:Interesting

[naris]

In my experience, most ultra-conservatives "who are very heavily opposed to communism and socialism" feel that "homeless people", the poor and other unfortunates are all considered "lazy people" who don't work because they choose not to and should be left out to die and reduce the surplus population.

Re:Interesting

[JesseMcDonald]

The original definition of Marxist Socialism involves state ownership of the means of production.

You're partly right in that they're gotten smarter about leaving in the appearance of private property when it doesn't conflict too badly with the way the government wants resources allocated. Why antagonize their flock needlessly, after all? But when private property owners accumulate and use their property in (non-harmful) ways the government doesn't like, regulation, taxes, and eminent domain are always ready to hand to bring things back in line with their vision.

The stance that you have the right to tell someone else how they can or cannot use their own property—absent any unauthorized impact to others' property—amounts in effect to a claim of ownership. Eminent domain takes this a step further by physically seizing the property, but even plain regulation, or the threat of regulation, is effectively a taking of private property for public use, most commonly without compensation. Ownership is the right to control. Whatever the government claims it has the right to regulate, it also claims to own. Is there anything that a modern government doesn't claim the right to regulate? As they see it, your property is their property, leased to you at their whim and only yours so long as they permit.

In some cases the taking is a small fraction of the item's value; in other cases the regulations destroy most or all of the items' value to the owner.

If you want to use the looser definition of socialism often employed in the US (transfer of wealth from top to bottom) then every government that has ever existed is socialist.

Not true. There have been, and are still, plenty of governments that are explicitly and publicly intended to work the other way, transferring wealth from the bottom to the top.

The more socialist ones also tend to have that effect in practice, but they work harder at disguising it. Any system which actually persisted in transferring wealth from the top to the bottom would soon find that there is no "top" left to transfer from. Redistribution is only effective when you can take small amounts from each of the many without the means to resist, for the concentrated benefit of a few. Of course, getting away with this depends on either an expensive enforcement system or the ability to successfully con the majority into thinking that all this redistribution is for their benefit.

Re:Interesting

[balbeir]

So we make up pretend jobs. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-...

Re:Interesting

[mschuyler]

Heard it before. "If you support public libraries, then you must be socialist." Fire departments, too, I suppose--anything paid with tax dollars. Stupid argument then;; stupid argument now.

Re:Interesting

[roman_mir]

I have 0 interest in people who will steal and rob and murder because they are poor. 0 interest and 0 use.

If you look at people who are very wealthy, they feel they have no choice but to hire private security regardless of them paying way more in every form of tax than any one of you ever will here in your entire life times. That is beside the fact that people who are extremely wealthy normally achieve that wealth by creating companies that cater to millions, tens or hundreds of millions of users and clients. That's the way to become a billionaire - run companies that produce on a scale that satisfies demands of millions of people. By making even 1 dollar off of millions of people you get millions in income. To satisfy demands of millions of people you have to create very good value, you likely have to do much better than the competition (of-course I am not talking about companies that rely on government provided monopolies and subsidies of any kind, who also do very well but not because they could do it on their own but because they have strong ties to government and money stolen from millions of individuals by governments).

So your average billionaire pays for private security in many different ways, whether this is enough to keep safe is an interesting question, probably nothing is ever enough for security, but the same is true for collectivist thieves - nothing is ever enough.

You can be paying millions in taxes and yet you will be called '1%, who is not paying their fair share' whatever the fuck that is.

I say that it is unfair to tax income of people who produce in the first place. Tax those who do not produce and who go out and steal, that's my position. Tax them, force them to repay everything they steal. But of-course this is too obvious to be accepted, because you will never make enough money that way to create the welfare state that you are rooting for every time you say that there has to be payment one way or another to those who will steal and murder.

AFAIC if you are stealing and murdering regardless of your circumstances, you are unfit to live in society where some people produce to live.

Re:Interesting

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Inflection is hard to tell on the internet. Do you mean that positively or negatively? I get that this article is negative...

But, the phenomenon in the article doesn't really scale well, as given by our horrible current employment stats.

Re:Interesting

[frank_adrian314159]

It better not be a pipe dream because otherwise, we're headed for revolution soon.

Re:Interesting

[shawn2772]

With all the productivity gains in the last 45 years, we should be down to a 16-hour work week if the increases were divided equitably between employers and employees.

Only if we were also to drop back to a 1970 standard of living. There's more than just inequality in play here; we've also moved the baseline up. Houses are larger and better, people drive better cars, people eat a wider variety of foods, have better clothing, travel more, etc., not to mention the massively-increased options we have for entertainment.

Re:Interesting

[BarbaraHudson]

According to your theories, life must have been amazingly better when the 72-hour week, with 6 12-hour days, was the norm. Feel free to work more for less.

Re:Interesting

[shawn2772]

According to your theories, life must have been amazingly better when the 72-hour week, with 6 12-hour days, was the norm. Feel free to work more for less.

Um, no, that doesn't follow. At all. In pre-industrial agrarian societies, such long, grinding work weeks were necessary for survival, at barely above a subsistence standard of living. Productivity increases both improved the standard of living and made it possible to work less. More recently, productivity increases have gone mostly to improving the standard of living rather than reducing work. Why? Good question. But that in no way implies that working 72-hour weeks today would reduce the standard of living to pre-industrial, agrarian levels, which seems to be the thrust of your argument.

Re:Interesting

[KGIII]

I have to wonder about the validity of the experiment. They know the money isn't going to last forever. It seems rather unlikely that they'll act like the money is going to last forever. They're not free to quit their jobs. They're not even necessarily free to cut down on their working hours. Doing so means they risk losing their job and being unemployed when the experiment concludes.

What the hell are they actually testing? This doesn't really prove anything, it doesn't even give any meaningful indicators if these people are already employed or might become employed soon. I'd not place a whole lot of stock in their "findings." It doesn't sound very rigorous to me.

Re:Interesting

[KGIII]

That's close enough to what I said earlier. Here's my name. Do you want to place a wager on it and use an escrow service so that we can actually make this interesting?

Re: Interesting

[Sibko]

UBI can't increase inflation - ever. It's not adding money to the economy, it's redistributing what already exists.

It's not the same thing as just giving everyone a million bucks. UBI is essentially a reformation of pre-existing welfare that gets rid of all the overhead and administrative costs involved in deciding who gets what.

Taxpayers on the high end (the upper 20% certainly) are paying tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in taxes. They avoid what they can, but they still pay a lot. These people will get say, $800/mo back from the government. It's a pittance to them, and doesn't offset their taxes whatsoever.

Meanwhile someone making less than $10,000/year, is now doubling that to almost $20,000. That's HUGE for them.

UBI is, in essence, a redistribution of money from those who pay the highest taxes to those who pay the least, and it's done without even increasing taxes. Been a long time coming, to be quite honest.

More importantly, doubling the income of people in the lower income brackets is going to massively increase consumer spending. This is the connection that finally completes the circuit on the flow of money in our economies. Right now it's just been accumulating in the coffers of the very rich, being invested and re-invested in ways that always gain and never lose them money, which has resulted in stagnation across the western world.

Increased consumer spending will also come on top of and out of, increased wages that will result when people aren't faced with a reality of work for a pittance or die, and can now actually negotiate fair wages for themselves from a position of financial security.

The biggest winners in UBI economies are the lower and middle classes, but there are no actual losers in a UBI economy. Even the ultra-rich who are most effected by taxation, are going to see their investments and businesses increasing in profits due to the explosion in consumer spending. The only real issue is overcoming everyone's preconceived notions of what UBI is and does - like this idea that it increases inflation because people now have more money to spend. It might be more apt to say that UBI will 'simply' massively increase the velocity of money in the economy.

With that said, there's a fair number of the ultra-rich who seem to think the masses deserve to wallow in misery - it's not enough that they win, everyone else also has to lose. UBI won't be able to fix that, and these types will be the ones hardest to overcome in regards to implementation of UBI, because they have the wealth necessary to fight it to the death.

Right now, the solution our "elites" have come up with to offset our unsustainable stagnating economic systems, is to import foreigners to continue massive economic growth: More people to tax, more loans to give out, more debt to add to GDP "growth", and lower wages across the board to save money. It's the wrong approach because they aren't considering most of the actual social/economic costs doing this. As such, I'm not particularly concerned about all this for the future of humanity - in the long run something like a UBI will be implemented regardless. The alternatives are completely unworkable and will result in collapse or at least greatly reduced economic efficiency; while UBI achieves the opposite, both with increased velocity of money and allowing the economy to continue to function while it is further automated.

The nations that implement UBI-like systems will succeed, and the ones who don't will fail. The actual choice we're faced with in the near future here, isn't whether or not we should implement a system like UBI, but whether we'll put it off until after economic collapse, political/social instability, and civil unrest/war, or before.

Knowing humanity, we're definitely going to kill each other a bunch first.

Re:Interesting

[BarbaraHudson]

Do some proper research. Pre-industrial societies worked far less than you think. And it's a HUGE lie to say anything like " Productivity increases both improved the standard of living and made it possible to work less. More recently, productivity increases have gone mostly to improving the standard of living rather than reducing work." The productivity increases over the last 45 years have not been responsible for the increased standard of working - that's from the huge increase in average household debt. The productivity gains, after discounting for inflation, haven't shown up in worker's paychecks.

The middle class used to own a home, a car, send their kids to school, take an annual vacation, and save up for retirement, all on one income. That doesn't happen so much any more, especially on a single income. Most people, even with two incomes, are stretched.

The reason houses are getting larger is debt. Not increased incomes. And houses in the more desirable areas, despite huge increases in cost, are getting smaller. You've got houses that look like tear-downs going for insane prices.

Re:Interesting

[Rockoon]

But UBI is not supposed to create wealth, it is supposed to redistribute it.

Thats funny, because it looks like its redistributing money, not wealth.

Wealth is the goods and services that people enjoy. Now if you create an incentive not to produce goods and not to provide services...there there will be less goods and services to go around... really.

Thats it. Thats the whole fucking thing boiled down to the only fact that matters. If you give people an incentive to not produce goods and to not provide services, then its a fact that less people will produce goods and less people will provide services. Thats less goods and less services to go around. Thats less wealth.

You claim that UBI isnt intended to create wealth... no fucking shit.. it destroys wealth.

Re:Interesting

[Goldsmith]

You've got an aggressively paternalistic view of homelessness.

I've been homeless (while working). It had little to do with money, and everything to do with me not being concerned about having a traditional place to live for a little while. My understanding is that my situation was typical of homelessness (where I live, at least). I really doubt UBI would change much here.

What UBI will change is people's willingness to quit a job and try their own thing. That's what Y Combinator wants to see happen here. We're seeing a slow, steady drop in startup creation, and that's a problem for their business model.

Re:Interesting

[Maxo-Texas]

I'd be interested in any articles you might have giving a deeper discussion of this concept.

Esp. since genetic basis for left-right (liberal/conservative) has been found in multiple studies.

I'm not disputing- i'm genuinely interested. Please give more details.

Re:Interesting

[shawn2772]

You don't seem to understand what money and debt are, or how they relate to production, so this isn't really a useful discussion. I'll just point out that how the larger house is financed doesn't change the fact that it requires greater productive capacity to create it.

Re:Interesting

[BarbaraHudson]

That "greater productive capacity" hasn't returned real returns to the overall economy. If it had, there wouldn't have been a need for a bail-out. Brand new houses that were torn down because they couldn't be sold can hardly be called productive. Houses that can't be dumped because the tax liens are more than their current worth (lots of Chicago, for example), didn't add anything to the country's productivity.

It's the same thing with the spiraling cost of higher education - it costs proportionally way more than it did at the turn of the century, for a product that is worth less in today's economy. This is sucking money from the current generation, money that can not be put into production of goods or other services.

And you haven't even addressed the fact that pre-industrial societies worked less, contrary to what you claimed.

It's you that doesn't understand the relationship between work, labor, productivity, and the role of debt in devaluing labor.

Re:Interesting

[Your.Master]

Extremely skeptical on this genetic basis of left-right, though I do accept that genetics could swing your opinion on an important issue or two that the current left/right paradigm happens to be divided on. The thing with left-right is it puts multiple variables on a single axis of consideration.

There is no obvious reason for your belief in the literal truth of a religious textbook that mostly doesn't address economic theory, to be correlated with your belief in supply-sided economic systems. And in some countries, the correlation doesn't really appear. Even at some times in living memory in the US, it wasn't there. But right now in the US, there is a strong correlation between those things.

Re:Interesting

[Your.Master]

Obviously a brand new house that is immediately torn down isn't a net gain for society. This said, this statement doesn't follow:

If it had, there wouldn't have been a need for a bail-out

.

No matter how you slice it, if you hold all else equal, but give everybody a house twice as big as it was 50 years ago, then *clearly* more productive capacity has been brought to bear. It's irrelevant whether it's encoded as a debt transaction or a cash transaction, somebody had to build and maintain houses, and it happened. We have more stuff. Debt is not negative-stuff.

This said, your link is very interesting. The 1440 hours annually figure it provides at the end was during a period of unusually low-labour, so let's compare it to http://www.businessinsider.com.... Looks like they still worked more than the Germans. Americans are working about 120% as much. Let's make every Friday a day off in the US, and you'll roughly match a period of unusually low-labour in preindustrial civilization :). Interesting note, even in the US, where labour has remained high, labourers work more than 10% less than they did 60 years ago.

Note the businessinsider.com links is for "full-time workers", and your link was for "laborers". It's probably as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get without embarking on a huge research project. Obviously that does skim over part-time workers and phenomena like periods of time where women were more or less likely to be counted in the full-time labour pool (my understanding is that the 50s would be the outlier time period, and now and preindustrial are closer to one another).

Re:Interesting

[HornWumpus]

Arguments are easy when you can use your own private definition of words.

Re: Interesting

[HornWumpus]

How do you think Madoff's clients felt when they first realized it was a Ponzi scheme. That's you right about now.

Re:Interesting

[HornWumpus]

I was homeless when I bought my house. The close was delayed by a week and I had to get out of my apartment.

So went on vacation. But I'm counted among the homeless for that year.

Re:Interesting

[HornWumpus]

Your parents were cruel. Naming you CaptainLard...

Re: Interesting

[dothasmurfysmurf]

Did you miss the part where robots and automation takes over producing goods and services?

Re:Interesting

[Maxo-Texas]

The genetics are pretty solid and involve twin studies.

Basically some people are comfortable with change and some people are comfortable with stability.

Re:Interesting

[Nocturna81]

You do realize the difference between absolute and relative right? The "1%" might pay more in absolute terms yes. But what people have a problem with is that the medium-sized incomes pay WAY more taxes relatively so a much, much larger chunk of their income is gone. Whereas the top incomes have much less of a tax burden.

I say that it is unfair to tax income of people who produce in the first place. Tax those who do not produce and who go out and steal, that's my position. Tax them, force them to repay everything they steal. But of-course this is too obvious to be accepted, because you will never make enough money that way to create the welfare state that you are rooting for every time you say that there has to be payment one way or another to those who will steal and murder.

Taking this to it's logical conclusion: there will be no more roads, police, fire department, army, etc. Everything that's now payed by the state will have insufficient funds to be continued because everyone that produces (ie, the working population) will not be taxed. I believe some countries in Africa use this kind of "government", if you can call it that what with nothing being governed as such. I suppose I won't convince you with a simple post. But I like to think of my taxes as "buying civilization" and I'll happily pay for the less fortunate in society from my relatively well off position if that means our society as a whole becomes stronger, safer and a better place to live. Adding to that, it's also one less thing to worry about, if I'm ever not able anymore to work, either because my job will become redundant because of technological advances or because (heaven forbid) fall ill I won't have to live on the street.

Re: Interesting

[Rockoon]

Did you miss the part where robots and automation takes over producing goods and services?

Only Robots producing goods and services, vs Humans and Robots producing goods and services.

Less wealth vs More Wealth.

This is simple, but you are thinking that I missed something? The reason that the basics (such as simple math) are so elusive to you here is cognitive dissonance. You can't feel good about the math, so you dont even notice when you make a horrible math error like declare that 1 is greater than 2.

Re: Interesting

[Ice Tiger]

You say more wealth but the trend is to invest capital for more automation as it becomes more affordable and generic. This also doesn't mean just robots but automation of services roles too, think about trading for example or the role that AI like Watson is filling. The trend has been that wealth transfers more to capital rather than labour which is our traditional means of wealth distribution so unless those at the top consume with insane abandon then our economies will eventually shrink. As automation makes inroads into traditional human jobs then it is inevitable that companies will adopt it just to stay in business. But robots and AI don't buy anything apart from small amounts of power and parts and their designers, technicians and owners will not make up for the lost income of previous workers in terms of spending in the economy. In that model UBI does not destroy wealth as it redistributes capital so that people can spend it to buy things.

Re:Interesting

[MitchDev]

Nah, no revolution is forthcoming. The masses are too hypnotized with their smartphones, american idol ( and other "reality" TV ), sports, polar opposite political positions with no middle ground (while the rich laugh and giggle and keep adding to their wealth), etc....

Re:Interesting

[BarbaraHudson]

Try again - house ownership is declining for the latest generation, and the foolishness of McMansions has baked in higher costs for those who bought them, leaving them less free money. That's why we say people are "house poor." They have to drive further to work (costing $$$), they have to pay more for heating, etc, and more in taxes.

Also, "average hours worked for persons engaged" totally fails to make the distinction between part-time and full-time jobs. In other words, it doesn't account for job quality. It also doesn't count for lost benefits, etc, with full-time employers over the last 40 years. You simply can't make the comparison.

However, if you dig a little bit and look at this graph from the same link, you'll see that share of labor compensation as a percentage of GDP is at a historical all-time low. Part-time and mcjobs, plus more people dropping out of the workforce, helps explain a chunk of that.

Re:Interesting

[roman_mir]

You do realize the difference between absolute and relative right? The "1%" might pay more in absolute terms yes. But what people have a problem with is that the medium-sized incomes pay WAY more taxes relatively so a much, much larger chunk of their income is gone. Whereas the top incomes have much less of a tax burden.

- a billionaire or a millionaire invests his income, spending on personal consumption is a trivial part of it. A millionaire makes money not to eat through it but so that his business(es) can grow. A growing business is the engine of economy.

Government taxing income of people who are not just running their families but running businesses is extremely detrimental to business development. It creates industries dedicated to avoiding taxes, which is resource misallocation. The stock market bubbles, the housing market bubbles, the bond market bubbles, so many bubbles are created by government manipulating money, interest rates, printing money (inflation), manipulating the tax code, creating business regulations that really act as blackmail instruments and also monopoly protection instruments to protect the established large players against any competition.

My point is that income and wealth taxes are not simply bad morally speaking (and yes, I think it is horrendous morals to steal and redistribute from anybody to anybody under any conditions and circumstances). I think it produces gigantic economic failures, the biggest of which is coming at this time - the USD and bond market bubbles that will blow up and create huge collateral damage the likes of which we haven't seen before even in biggest world wars.

Do you know that the original *stated* intent for the income tax in USA in 1913 was to tax the top 1% at no more than 7% (they were considering writing 10% into the code but were afraid that if 10% was written down it would become the actual tax rate, instead they left it open to interpretation and now tax rates are many times that). The income tax was introduced to replace the income of the Federal government that was going to be lost due to removal of the alcohol tax. The alcohol tax accounted for about 50% of government revenues until 1913 and there were no income taxes at all.

Then of-course, the collectivist government saw this money coming in and of-course expanded everything, the tax rates, the brackets, whatever. Until approximately 1917 nobody with less than a million dollars in income paid any income taxes. So economically speaking it's a horrible precedent, to allow government's nose under the tent, it's the biggest and most cunning and most horrible of all camels.

Of-course there were roads, police, fire department, army before 1913, or you didn't know that? The rail roads were private, the first subways were private, bridges were private, roads were private and USA economy grew by such an enormous amount in the last half of the 19th century that USA from being an afterthought to European countries and a debtor nation became the biggest produce of cheap, high quality goods, biggest exporter and became largest creditor nation in under 50 years.

Of-course again, the collectivist government saw that as an opportunity to steal and expand and grow its power and buy votes with promises of redistribution of stolen goods.

All I see when I look at any government is theft, nothing else, not civilization, destruction of individual freedom, destruction of economies, destruction of civilization. I think only free people build civilizations that can last, slaves (as people whose income is taxes by governments are slaves, whose masters let them keep some of their money but the understanding is that at any moment in time everything can be taken away - that is slavery), slaves do not build lasting civilizations.

You are under a false impression that the minuscule amount of money that is taken from you in taxes is the point. You are wrong, the actual target for theft are people with property that produc

Re:Interesting

[david_thornley]

Dictatorships are dictatorships, whether right-wing or left-wing. If you're studying how dictatorships form, distinguishing fascism from Marxism is important. If you're living there, it's much less so.

Re:Interesting

[david_thornley]

Does that apply to left-right though? In the US, the right wing is the one trying to make radical changes to the country, so you'd think that actual conservatives, the ones who like to take change slowly, would avoid it.

Re:Interesting

[david_thornley]

If we give out $2K/person/month in the US, that's something like $4.5T a year. That is a lot of money. Some of it will be saved by eliminating existing programs, and some will be recouped by taxation. Where the rest comes from is a good question, particularly since this isn't enough money to cover decent health care.

It's an interesting idea, but I'd like to see specifics before I decide whether I like it or not.

Re:Interesting

[david_thornley]

One problem with quitting one's job to pursue something is that you can only do it under certain circumstances. A father with a stay-at-home wife and children has a very good reason to stay where he is and not try something new.

What we want is more people who are free to fail, because that means more people who succeed at something that looked dumb, and that's a good way to make the economy develop optimally, avoiding local maxima. UBI and universal health care mean that more people can take chances.

Re:Interesting

[lsatenstein]

An interesting experiment, to be sure, and I'm glad that someone has the money to try it out.

It's hard to know until you're actually in the situation, of course, but I think that if I had a minimum income in addition to what I make now, I'd drop down to working part time and spend the balance volunteering and pursuing music again.

What separates the men from the boys, is the cost of their toys. Provide a way, with a fixed income, to have some discretionary money for a toy. (cellphone,used car...)

Re:Interesting

[lsatenstein]

As somebody who is very heavily opposed to communism and socialism, I'm interested in seeing the results of UBI (which is neither communism nor socialism, rather just a form of welfare) however I wouldn't want it anywhere I plan to live anytime soon, because it's one of those things where once you have it, it's practically impossible to take away, no matter what kinds of problems it creates or doesn't actually solve.

You offer no advantages to starving and restricting health/legal access to the poor. Your method increases the crime rate, as people who have nothing, will do anything to survive.

A person on the production line doesn't have a well endowed 491K. You know what it's like, food, medicine, rent money has to be juggled.

I too am opposed to communism, where the state owns it all. Democratic socialism is what makes a world class country.

Re:Interesting

[rtb61]

First off people want to feel safe. So the basic income provides everything a peaceful drug addict needs to stay peaceful, including the drugs and logically it should also pay for birth control, in fact birth control would definitely be a part of that accord, perhaps built into the happy drugs. At the end of the days, those that do more want to feel safe, from those who do not, so crime reduction is the major focus and how to achieve that at low total cost. Simple comfortable accommodation, food, drugs, entertainment and social interaction, and birth control are way, way cheaper, really no comparison to the current alternate. Victims of crimes and those costs, huge costs in life and property and fear, just there alone is the greater cost. Then you have a destructive law enforcement culture developing, rather than policing and peacekeepers and life saving first responders, you actually pay more per peace keeper but they do a whole lot more good and generate a whole lot less harm and the harm the create has massive costs again. Shit we are beyond the costs of a sound birth limited social parking (parked until through group and social support structures some are recovered) system and we haven't even touched the costs of courts and the prosecution system and let alone the massive costs of imprisonment, only to see recidivism as the outcome and the massive cost cycle kicking over again.

So the whole idea is to create a diminishing system via birth control for, non-contributors, rather than a continually expanded system as a result of abusive exploitation feeding into crime, creating victims and becoming an ever expanding drain on the economy via prisons. At the bottom end of the economic chain, that money simply straight up circulates through local economies and keeps things ticking over and calm, I mean you would certainly prefer that the money not be used to purchase imports and focus on local expenditure and most certainly you do not want to fund a growing population of non-contributors (like the rich and greedy, taking the lions share of the profits from the people who do the actual work or making money from just shifting money about does not make you a contributor just an extremely greedy parasite).

As long as it is a shrinking problem, who really cares how long it takes as long as we can live safe and peaceful lives. Not to forget private owner ship of resources is in point of fact, violent theft of public resources and there is no escaping that truth (that theft of public resources is enforced in the most brutal ways imaginable).

Re:Interesting

[stoatwblr]

The original communist manifesto was for a post-capitalist world where increasing automation meant that large parts of the population were un (or under-) employed and was viewed as a natural progession, not something achieved by violent revolution.

Viewed in that context it may well be the way we need to go.

Socialism is an intermediate step and works quite well in the western countries which have tried it.

Unfortunately there have also been (and are) systems which call themselves communist or socialist that are nothing of the sort - but that's the type of society we associate with those words now. An Oligarchic/plutocratic/autocratic commend economy structure may be many things but it bears little relationship to Marx' original document.

Re:Interesting

[RespekMyAthorati]

Africa does not suffer from lack of government

Tell that to the people in Somalia or Libya, who don't have functioning governments. And whose life is hell as a result.

The rail roads were private, the first subways were private, bridges were private,

Total fucking horseshit.

Re: Interesting

[maple_shaft]

Redistribution yes but for all intents and purposes there is the fucked up casino economy of the rich and the real economy. Money that is being created now is going right into investment banks and stock buybacks and other gimmicks. It is not making its way to the real economy where if it came in fast and strong could,in fact cause inflation but only if the things that lower class people want weren't so thoroughly commoditized.

Re:Interesting

[roman_mir]

Somalia and Libya have many governments, those countries were also torn by wars they fought against occupation for decades.

Rail roads, subways, roads, bridges were private. Rail roads were basically confiscated and torn down and the federal government put together a plan to get into business of every State by creating the monstrosity known as the 'interstate highway system'. Hawaii 1 (H1) - an intestate designed for one purpose only: to oppress the State by using the power of the federal government. Same with all other interstate highways, only this one stands out too ludicrously.

Re: Interesting

[Rockoon]

You say more wealth but the trend is to invest capital for more automation as it becomes more affordable and generic.

...which doesnt support your argument, and it doesnrt even touch on the two plain simple facts you are are pretending to be refuting.

The plain and simple facts are (a) that if we have more goods and services then we are richer than if we have less goods and services, and (b) Robots can't produce as much goods and services as Humans + Robots.

Thats it. Try to refute these facts against and you will just look like a fucking rationalizing partisan again. I know that you don't want these basics to be true, but they are un-fucking-deniable.

Maybe you can save your feels by instead taking the stand that less wealth is better. That might work... what doesnt work is claiming that 1 is greater than 2, which is what you have done twice now.

Re:Interesting

[Shortguy881]

Taxation and grants are indirect ways of controlling production. Wake up, the U.S. is a socialist oligarchy.

Re: Interesting

[HornWumpus]

Depends on who's numbers. I bet your local homeless advocacy group doesn't use the actual count.

Moving with no forwarding address is enough.

So...

[psergiu]

Does the study include some "middle-class" test subjects so see how well they do after paying higher taxes ?

Re: So...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to read more and tone down your politics.

Universal basic income actually lowers taxes, since everyone gets the same regardless, as you don't need a huge bureaucracy to dole out the funds.

Re: So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the sums done for the UK, that is complete and absolute bollocks.

If it replaced some benefits it would be fine, but it would need to be topped up with housing benefit, the higher rate of disability ( for those with more expensive disabilities ), etc, and the sums done show it would be outrageously expensive.

Re:So...

[vux984]

I am not intimately familiar with the tax regime where ever you live, but every where I've ever lived, as your income goes up your taxes go up incrementally only on the additional income.

e.g. if you make 10,000 you get taxed, 0$
if you make 30,000 you get taxed 0$ on the first 10, and then 10% of the next 20, for a total of 2k

if you make 50,000 you get taxed 0$ on the first 10, 10% on the next 20k, and then 30% on the next 30k. For a total of ~12k.

In super progressive taxation, it can get up to 60% and beyond. But that rate only starts on the dollars OVER X$.

So you don't "lose money" by reaching a higher tax bracket, you just make progressively less with each additional dollar.

Ie... your first thousand dollars you keep every penny of those dollars, but your 200,000th dollar you keep only 45 cents of that dollar.

So,even if I'm in the top tax bracket, and you give me another 10,000 in income I'll take it. I'll only keep 4,000. But that's still 4,000 more than I had. And if I'm smart, and invest it or shelter it I get to keep more than if I just use it as more walking-around-money.

Making more money and "Paying higher taxes" still means I took home more money than if I hadn't made more money in the first place.

So this all boils down to: "Does the study include some "middle-class" test subjects so see how well they do after paying higher taxes ?"

Why EXACTLY do you see this as a likely issue? Are you just unfamiliar with how taxes actually work? Or bad at math? Or is there some genuine issue that arises where you live if someone gave you a bunch of money that it would somehow ruin your life?

Its true there are some edge cases in tax law, where as your income goes up you no longer qualify for certain deductions or subsidies, but even then its nearly always a zero sum game. And worst case you end up with the same amount you started with despite receiving more money. But these usually only affect the lower/barely middle class.

The only "trap" to suddenly making more money is not being aware what you can keep, and spending more than you actually were entitled to keep, creating a tax bill you don't have money to pay. (e.g. if you make 50,000 a year set aside money to pay a tax bill for someone who makes 50k a year, and someone gives you a new 10k in income, going on a 10k vacation with it is pretty stupid.)

Re: So...

[bondsbw]

This is false. You can't say it lowers taxes since UBI doesn't prescribe any particular amount of money that is redistributed.

As an extreme example, say 100% of everyone's money in the US is taxed for the sole purpose of UBI. Then everyone would get around $53K of income (ignoring the fact that practically everybody would immediately leave their jobs and do nothing). It's quite obvious that this is a UBI system, and it's a system where taxes undoubtedly increase.

My quick math indicates that to get a UBI of around half of the poverty level (I used $7500 as half the poverty level), we would need to increase federal income tax revenue by around 200% (we would be paying 3 times as much taxes as today). That doesn't account for removing all current welfare programs, the reduced costs to society due to reduced crime, or other costs.

Re: So...

[tricorn]

As a study there will surely be some aspects that won't be properly handled. A true UBI, however, would replace all oher direct forms of government support. There would still be some government supported benefits, such as Universal Health Care, and you'd either take care of people with disabilities or other special needs through that or a specific program for such needs.

You'd also want government support for education, perhaps not totally free (you want people to feel like they have a stake and not waste resources), but something available to everyone who wants it, although online courses (requiring no individual attention) should be totally free. I'd class affordable housing, food, communication and a few other things as areas where the government should take steps to ensure access.

With a UBI, you can go to a straight flat tax. The UBI makes up for the regressive nature of a flat tax. You can also eliminate the minimum wage. As jobs become scarce, it shouldn't be expected that you have a job or be seen as a leech, you'll work at a job in order to be able to buy more stuff, not because you have to to survive. As such, having a true free market for labor no longer has to be countered with a minimum wage.

As automation increases productivity enormously, there's no reason the only beneficiaries should be the upper levels, everyone should benefit. A relatively high (flat) income tax, combined with a VAT-like sales tax, would stabilize the economy. One scheme would be to have the tax rates automatically set based on the budget (which includes the UBI). Set rates such that half the revenue comes from the VAT and half comes from the income tax (including corporations). A spending bill is automatically a tax bill.

There will still be plenty of people who will want more stuff and will be willing to work for it. There will also be plenty of people who use the freedom to do amazing things. Taking care of people who do need assistance would be much cheaper, and would remove the stigma of being "on the dole".

I think the Protestant work ethic (in fine form with some of the comments here) is one of the biggest threats to our economy and society as we advance to more automation and fewer available jobs.

Re: So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how every idiot on Slashdot is eternally convinced that Slashdot is dominated by whoever they disagree with.

Re:So...

[Junta]

I don't see where the parent claimed that the higher taxes would be through being elevated by UBI. His point was that the money has to come from somewhere (given the current state of economy, taxes), and in his example he believed the working class would carry a higher burden than the UBI would offset. You couldn't fund a UBI out of anything even vaguely pretending to be a 'fixed' currency without taking it from those with money, and contrary to people who sharpen the pitchforks, the 'wealthy' don't have enough to take to deliver what people want from a UBI. Now one could reasonably make the argument that things aren't that simple (money isn't fundamentally anything but an arbitrary number), but the argument gets very complex and subjective (trying to use a rational set of systems to characterize a population that frequently acts irrationally works ok most of the time, but this is a stretch so it's hard to predict).

All that said, the tax bracket confusion and deductions are two things that puzzle me the most about common talk. "No, don't pay down your mortgage early, then you lose the tax deduction!" I could either have a few thousand dollars, or not have it, but be comforted knowing it got me out of a couple hundred dollars of tax bill, brilliant!

Re:So...

[jedidiah]

All of this stupid "take it from the rich" rhetoric ignores the fact that the rich can actually defend themselves. They have political influence to distort legislation can craft loopholes for themselves. They can also pay for hired guns to help get them from under any measures that are actually passed. This is why they are rich in the first place.

So the people that will really get clobbered are the successful bits of the working class. The propaganda groundwork is already being laid for this. Liberal journalists are already trying delegitimize successful working professionals and stoke the fires of intra-class envy.

It's the people that are already living the European city lifestyle in the large American coastal cities that will get clobbered the most by the ensuing taxation feeding frenzy. The "rich" will protect themselves. It's the top end of the working class that will get hammered instead.

Re: So...

[visualight]

Are you sure? I also did some quick math and came to a different conclusion, that we would probably *save* money.

Adult population of the U.S.(rounded up): 246,000,000

Gross Federal Tax Revenue of the U.S.: 3.3 trillion

Cost of providing all adults 1800/month: 443 billion

THINGS YOU COULD GET RID OF:
food stamps: 74 billion
soc sec ( just pensions ): 52 billion
Unemployment Insurance : 520 billion ( says CNN )

#http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-population-by-child-and-adult#detailed/1/any/false/869,36,868,867,133/39,40,41/416,417

http://www.cbpp.org/research/p...

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue...

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/2...

Re: So...

[narcc]

Why do you think most people would do nothing? The motivation to improve their lot in life aside, I can't imagine most people are willing to just stay idle. I can think of few people who would. From pursuing personal projects, to volunteering for causes they think are important, just about everyone I know has something that would productively occupy their time.

Most people, you'll find, want to feel useful. Most people take pride in the work that they do.

A carpenter I know who volunteers >40 hours a week at a social club, of which I'm a member, often proudly shows-off pictures of the work he's done during the week. At that same club, a retired woman volunteers so often she's regularly scheduled for shifts like our regular employees. She loves the work the club does for the local community and wants to contribute in some meaningful way. So much so that she essentially works for free full-time. She's been offered a paycheck countless times and continues to refuse it. She doesn't think that she'd be helping the club if she took a wage.

That's just two people, but I can easily go on. You mentioned farming and grave digging. I don't know anyone in the latter category, but I can't imagine that it would be difficult to find people willing to maintain a cemetery. (There is at least one around here that is all volunteer.) As for farming, I do know a fellow who left an otherwise excellent career to return to farming, despite a significant cut in pay. He grew up on a farm, and finds a lot of fulfillment in that sort of work.

Fulfillment is the key here, I think. If you hate working and would rather be idle than do something productive, you simply aren't finding any value in the work you do. You're working for a paycheck, trading your life for money. That's not what most people want. Even among those with few options, they try to take pride in the work that they do. Some of them will even brag about how they've mastered each of the sections/tasks/machines and can work at any station. They seek more than a wage, but a sense of satisfaction.

If that's been denied to you, though circumstance or poor choices, I'm sorry. No one in this modern age should be working just to survive or working in some absurd quest to accumulate wealth. I'd recommend that you find work that you enjoy, or that at least that offers you something more than a check at the end of the week. Perhaps, then, you'd understand why someone would work voluntarily.

Re: So...

[bondsbw]

Your math is wrong.

Assuming you are comparing $443B to $74B + $52B + $520B = $646B, your units don't line up. The $443B is per month. $74B is per year. The $520B is for 5 years. (Not sure about $52B, didn't find it, I'll assume yearly unless you can correct me.)

So doing putting them all in yearly figures:

$443B * 12 months = $5314B/year
$520B / 5 years = $104B/year

$5314B is definitely much more than $74B + $52B + $104B = $230B. 23 times as much, actually.

Re: So...

[visualight]

oh wow you're right! thanks man

Re: So...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Looks like you are off by a factor of 12. Your $443 billion is the monthly cost (246,000,000 people * $1800/month/person = $442.8 billion /month) while the numbers you provided are all over the place. The $52 billion for the portion of SS you mention looks like it is the monthly cost same with food stamps, but the unemployment insurance was the cost over 5 years. So spending $433 billion a month means we will spend about $5 trillion a month of 25% more than the president's current proposed budget and still not actually fund any of the government. As far as saving money this won't and I haven't seen anyone other than you claim it will.

Re:So...

[psergiu]

100% of the people will get $2000 UBI every month from the budget.
77% are actually sending money to that budget (trough taxes, like income, medicaid & co)

If i'm part of that working 77% i will get my $2000 UBI each month but i will have to pay more than $2000 in taxes each month so everyone, working or not, can receive their UBI.

With UBI of $2000 per person, a family of 2 or more people can live just fine (for example in Texas). Thus a lot of those 77% working people will choose to live on UBI, further increasing the taxes on the remaining working ones.

If we're talking about a lower UBI value - like $200 a month - that sum is useless for someone having UBI as his sole income.

Re:So...

[australopith]

Thought experiment. If you charged every dollar at the highest tax rate, then took the excess money and divided it amongst all workers, would low income workers be better or worse off? How about dividing it amongst all adults? Or all citizens?

Re:So...

[Junta]

I don't know where you live, but in the U.S., welfare is far from guaranteed even to those who need it.

One, if you don't have children, you probably aren't going to get welfare.

Even if you get welfare benefits, you can't get them forever.

Ignoring all of that, there is a huge dynamic shift between 'you can only get welfare if you really need it, and your needs will be verified' and 'you are guaranteed this basic income no matter what' in terms of how a lot of people approach the workforce. I know a few people on the brink of poverty, who would drop their job in a heartbeat with a UBI scheme. Most people well above the line wouldn't think of giving up their luxuries, but a large chunk of people don't have luxuries to start with, so they got nothing to lose.

Hopefully we don't have need to 'force' people to work forever, and we have an awkward potential scenario of some *needing* to work but not needing *everyone* to do so. However things as it stands can have downsides. It might be worth it in the end, but we can't pretend this is a mere administrative change.

Re:So...

[david_thornley]

Speaking as one in the upper 10%, I'm sure I'd lose money on this arrangement, which doesn't necessarily mean I'm against it.

Re:So...

[shutdown -p now]

It's not a given that UBI is even more expensive than all the current welfare schemes combined, if it replaces them. We spend a lot of money on bureaucracy alone, to figure out who "deserves" a welfare check - and keep piling on with inane ideas such as mandatory drug tests. A simple scheme where everyone just gets a cut is vastly easier and cheaper to maintain, and offers less opportunity for corruption etc.

It can also be used to simplify the tax code by ditching progressive taxation altogether. If everyone gets such a check, and only get taxed on income above and beyond it, that's effectively progressive taxation by itself, with a smooth distribution curve rather than brackets.

Re:So...

[shutdown -p now]

All of this stupid "take it from the rich" rhetoric ignores the fact that the rich can actually defend themselves. They have political influence to distort legislation can craft loopholes for themselves. They can also pay for hired guns to help get them from under any measures that are actually passed. This is why they are rich in the first place.

No amount of hired guns can save you from a populist revolution. Only concessions can.

When the degree of automation gets high enough that we will have steady two-digit unemployment, it'll be either welfare or pitchforks. Smart capitalists prefer to pay people off, which is exactly what UBI is, if you think about it. That's exactly why you see this experiment funded by private money.

And the stupid capitalists end up on the literal, not figurative, pitchforks. See also: Russia 1917.

Re:So...

[vux984]

I know a few people on the brink of poverty, who would drop their job in a heartbeat with a UBI scheme.

Why exactly? Is it because life is good enough on barely-enough-to-live and they don't want more? Or because working their asses off at a shitty job for the same amount they'd get from welfare just isn't worth getting off the couch?

Because I can see the latter.

One probelm with welfare as implemented is that it too often becomes a case of "make $200 week working a shit job" OR "make $250 week not working at all on welfare". And if they get a job they lose the welfare. If they get a part time job they lose all the welfare and actually take home less then they were when they weren't working. Or if they get a min-wage job that pays shit they might find themselves working 32.25 hours a week on shifts scheduled by a monkey throwing shit at the wall to make $50 more than they were on welfare... why bother?

So welfare becomes a bit of a trap... where its not worth getting off it until they cut you off unless you find an genuinely half decent job.

A better implementation of welfare (or as most UBI proposal work) would be that you get your $200/week for being a citizen, and then if you pick up a part time job, or a shitty almost full time job or whatever... you actually get to keep most of that too.

Suddenly its actually worth taking that shitty job, because your disposable income goes noticeably up, for the effort you put in. And situations like flex time, and part time jobs etc aren't so problematic.

On the flipside, we also need to remove things that provide incentives to companies to prefer part time employees over full time employees. There are lots of real reasons to need part time worker - filling peak hours, seasonal demand, etc; but not wanting to pay benefits or statutory holiday or whatever is not one of them.

Re:So...

[Junta]

They can't get welfare, therefore they have a job they absolutely hate, and never could find a passion that could reward them.

True, the amount of shitty work to elevate their position would be potentially more rewarding, but after spending decades on the brink, they are pretty well calibrated to it, and would just as soon keep living at that level, with fewer worries about the next pay check. They would spend more time with family, maybe do some creative things on a video sharing service. I can't envision them continuing to work shit job to get disposable income for things they've gotten. Their quality of life would improve, but they'd have to dig up someone else to do the pretty thankless work they've done to date. I could be wrong and they suddenly grow some ambition for nicer things, but it's hard for me to imagine.

Re:So...

[RespekMyAthorati]

And the stupid capitalists end up on the literal, not figurative, pitchforks

But the rich can afford killer robots.
Let's see: pitchforks v.s. killer robots, I wonder which would win...

Re:So...

[shutdown -p now]

You mean, the rich can afford to pay the poor to manufacture the killer robots...

There is a slight problem in that plan, however.

Patreon

[0100010001010011]

Sounds a lot like Patreon where people will pay you for "self-employment, artistic endeavors, or idleness."

But has just ended up turning into a grandstanding for a certain minority of people.

My prediction is the money will flow to the loudest and most offensive grandstanders and people that could have been helped by this will most likely be ignored.

Then again I don't earn $4.7k/month not doing anything for FreeBSD under a name very containing FreeBSD.

Re:Patreon

[drinkypoo]

Does Patreon allow you to make a one-time payment yet? That's why I've never used it. Last time I checked, which was admittedly a while back, you could only schedule a recurring payment, and I'm really not that into the videos I'd be funding with Patreon that I want to sign up to support them unconditionally.

I still want micropayments so I can just send someone a buck or two when I like their video. Some of these videos have a million likes, some people have numerous videos with shitloads of likes, there's money in there somewhere and I'm actually shocked that Google hasn't figured out a way to get a piece of it yet

Re:Patreon

[0100010001010011]

Well, there's a solution for that and it rhymes with SmitCoin (which slashdot seems to hate).

Re:Patreon

[AmiMoJo]

Geez, any excuse to have a dig at her, huh? I think this is what the kids are referring to as "butthurt".

It's kinda like Nickelback. Shitty, shitty music that makes you angry when you think how many people gave them money and encouraged them to carry on making it. But hay, sometimes things you dislike are popular, get over it.

Re:Patreon

[0100010001010011]

The more you post, the less I'm convinced you aren't the neckbeard on Reddit with the purely coincidental exact same username.

Re:Patreon

[0100010001010011]

I guess her Patreon didn't get the message: https://www.patreon.com/freebs...

Cynical

[MitchDev]

Where is the money to provide this "Universal Basic Income" going to come from? How will employers that still have a workforce respond in terms of existing wages? How much inflation will this cause? What will happen to home prices/rents/leases/etc costs? Don't seeing it working realistically until human nature changes dramatically...

Re:Cynical

[conquistadorst]

Where is the money to provide this "Universal Basic Income" going to come from? How will employers that still have a workforce respond in terms of existing wages? How much inflation will this cause? What will happen to home prices/rents/leases/etc costs? Don't seeing it working realistically until human nature changes dramatically...

I completely understand your cynicism because I agree but I don't see an amount specified in the article. If it's something meager like $7K-$15K then I'm not sure it would truly change much of anything. I mean in the US, I think we more or less already have this under different names and parameters? I would be of the opinion that welfare, medicaid, medicare, social security, and the standard tax deduction all touch the spirit of a "universal basic income" except through complex rules, inclusions, and exclusions. I think current laws' end result is trying surgically pinpoint the people that need it "more" but than others. More or less they favor the people that are old, impoverished, or crippled but even those doing well still get some minimal benefits annually. Without knowing all of the rules it would be hard for me to be supportive or not but if they did away with all of the other existing systems of support I would certainly be in favor of overhauling and simplifying the entire system top to bottom. Now if the amount was something like $30K or more, my opinion would shift drastically.

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

But if this is to ultimately be for ALL people, the money needed to provide it will be staggering... After all, people who still have jobs will still get this money, right? Why bother to work if the deadbeats are still getting a check for doing absolutely nothing...

Re:Cynical

[Daemonik]

First off, all social benefits would be re-evaluated and possibly combined into your UBI. Unemployment, food stamps, welfare, and others. Their supporting bureaucracies would be eliminated as well as we'd only need one much smaller organization to pay out the UBI. There would be some shifting of taxes but the UBI would be non-taxable income.

Second, the UBI is only seen as being about $18000-20000 dollars. It's enough that you don't 'have' to work or panic if you lose your job, it's not Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Third, the minimum wage would be eliminated or vastly reduced. Employers could hire you for tips and no actual salary, part time and get employees who actually want to be there rather than employees grudgingly working to survive. You would have a lot more room to negotiate between employee and employer for salary.

If you're already employed, your employer would likely reduce your wage the total amount of the UBI however you'd still be making the same amount of money as before. Taxes would be on anything over the UBI.

As for inflation.. well, how much does long term unemployment effect inflation? How much does raising minimum wage to reflect cost of living effect inflation?

Why would it effect home prices/rents/leases/etc? Other than more people who can afford to pay rent? That actually may raise rents, as more people are able to seek housing, but then it'd spur construction which would spur hiring, which helps the economy.

Re:Cynical

[bondsbw]

Where is the money to provide this "Universal Basic Income" going to come from?

If implemented at large (not just this experiment), it would likely be from an addition to current progressive income taxes.

How will employers that still have a workforce respond in terms of existing wages?

I think the minimum wage would need to be removed, assuming the UBI is large enough. It wouldn't be necessary anyway, since people's basic needs are theoretically met. And since nobody would ever feel they need to work for 50 cents an hour just to survive, employers would have to compete on wages anyway.

Otherwise, it depends on where the increase in taxes to compensate for UBI comes from. If it is a payroll tax, employers would likely compensate by lowering wages and/or withholding raises. If it is a personal income tax, employers would generally sustain the current wages.

How much inflation will this cause?

Probably less than the minimum wage increases it replaces. In fact, if minimum wage is abolished, I would be we could see a decrease in inflation due to lower prices in markets employing unskilled or low-skill labor.

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

$18000-20000 x 330+ million in just the US alone. Where is is all coming from? "Employers could hire you for tips and no actual salary" So it would make things even worse than they are now? No, absolutely not, this is some bizarro pipe dream that would never actually work.

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

Pipe dream

Re:Cynical

[jedidiah]

...except some of us have actual experience with these kinds of arrangements, or know those that do.

The end result may be a system where there is little economic incentive to have any sort of ambition. Your only motivation might be to avoid digging a ditch. If you eliminate even that motivation, then you may find it difficult to recruit anyone to do anything.

Soviet communism led to the Slashdot-type crowd being paid less than retail store clerks. The motivation to even bother with a STEM job was the fact that unemployment was a crime and it was better to not have to dig a ditch.

Take away the criminal aspect of not working and a lot of people probably would not bother. A lot of people in corporate jobs suck at them and have no motivation as is.

Re:Cynical

[Daemonik]

I admit I don't have every answer for every dollar, but there are a lot of untapped/undertapped revenue streams in the US too. It's worth the public discussion.

"Employers could hire you for tips and no actual salary" So it would make things even worse than they are now? No, absolutely not, this is some bizarro pipe dream that would never actually work.

Your vision is pretty narrow there. If you're already being paid X amount by the government, then how is it "worse" for an employer to pay only tips for something like wait staff? The employee is making a base wage regardless of what they do. "Work" becomes a much more negotiable thing because it's shifted from "necessary for survival" to "something in addition that I enjoy doing".

You're also overlooking the many jobs and restaurants already that have part time employees DELIBERATELY on public assistance, so they can have them on call. They also routinely already underpay or outright steal wages from their employees.

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

"You're also overlooking the many jobs and restaurants already that have part time employees DELIBERATELY on public assistance, so they can have them on call. They also routinely already underpay or outright steal wages from their employees" Yeah, more of the wealthy cheating the working man. Just like now, except now we're going to pay people to not work, and penalize those who do get off their ass and work to support them by paying them less No, pipe dream, not gonna happen

Re:Cynical

[Daemonik]

You seem incapable of understanding that although your job would "pay" you less, since you're ALSO getting the UBI, you'd make more than the UBI. It's really pretty simple, so I have to think you're deliberately trolling the issue.

Re:Cynical

[mattventura]

It needs to be high enough to live a cheap life off of (think small apartment with a roommate), but still low enough to encourage people to still get jobs. The advantage is that it allows you to eliminate all the administrative overhead from the current programs, since those require deciding who is going to receive them. Realistically, enough people will still work, because the more people who quit their jobs, the higher wages will go, thus encouraging more people to work. This is probably a better solution to income inequality woes than things like $15/hr minimum wages and the like, because the problem right now (with or without a minimum wage) is that if someone is living paycheck to paycheck, they have essentially no bargaining room with their employer. UBI (or at the very least, much more liberal unemployment benefits) would mostly fix such a problem, since the threat of quitting a job becomes much more credible.

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

No, I see the cost of everything going up to cover the new taxes. Plus you still have to come up with the initial 330 million+ citizens x 18-20K per person, and that's JUST for the USA ...

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

Plus, why should working people make less just because of UBI? This UBI plan is just incentive to not even try for most people.

Re:Cynical

[MitchDev]

Cheap life where though? Hicksville, Arkansas cheap, or New York City where a walk-in closet sized apartment costs more than a huge home in most small cities...? The threat means nothing, because their will always be cheap labor overseas...

Modified life plan for this goal..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an electrical engineer. I've worked in lots of neat jobs.

A few years ago I realized none of those technical jobs would get me off the hamster wheel; having enough investments so I could eat, pay for basic living expenses, and then make nifty things and services instead. Financial independence. This is not the same thing as being filthy rich; for an accurate number, it involves having about $500k in liquid assets under investment generating income. Assuming you're willing to live someplace cheap. (I am)

I'm not from money, quite the opposite, and am unwilling to risk it all on ability to raise capital. I didn't understand how the rich stayed rich. I know what not having money to buy food feels like. Not going there. Ever again.

I looked at where the money is, and there's lots of it in financial-related industries, particularly if you're good with numbers - and even "advanced" financial math isn't that difficult relative to engineering.

My goal - through a career change and making other investment a life priority - was to get off the hamster wheel. I've devoted 10 years, or a measurable percentage of my life to this so I can enjoy the rest. I'm 6 years into my plan, and on track to make my goals, along with my wife, who shares my ambition to be free. ...but look at this!

Guaranteed income offers everyone that chance. Go do what you want to the net benefit of society. Remove that worry and fear. Remove the stigma. Hell, call it a citizenship dividend.

People will work; it's in our natures. What will change is what and how they work; most (many) jobs are pointless and should be automated. They WILL be automated in short order. Once this happens you can become a prison state, ripe for chaos; or you can adopt a scheme like this one.

We live in the future. This will be interesting.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[liquid_schwartz]

People will work; it's in our natures.

I'm not sure I agree with your premise. I know that some people will always work. Myself and my mom for example. My two sisters probably wouldn't. My ex wife, a childhood friend, and a few others I know all avoid work as much as possible. Fun experiment, ask a lazy person do help you and see how fast they are busy that day. I am not against the citizen dividend as long as the citizens have to something other than breathe to get it. Work and pay taxes, great you qualify. If you're retired or not working a paying job then you have to do something else. I like what Maine has done with regards to people who want free stuff, where you have to volunteer a certain number of hours to qualify. Everyone I know on disability is doing a big fat nothing to help the world that helps them. This is wrong. I'm not against helping people, however money for nothing is a bad idea.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[monkeyxpress]

Wow this is such a different take from me. I'm also an electrical engineer. I got tired of the hamster wheel, but not because of the financial serf-dom side of things (I never found the pay an issue), but because it was just incredibly boring. Even working for great companies on cool projects generally boils down to doing a whole lot of mundane form filling, process following and politicking. The days of being able to do neat engineering work just got less and less, and as you get older you quickly realise that nobody generally wants to create the 'next big thing'. They just want to do a bunch of small marketing driven improvements to maintain profits for as long as possible and sweat capital (just look at the iPhone/iPad). NBT is too risky and disruptive and few companies will do it unless forced to.

The reality though is that if the boredom didn't get to you, you could (and still can in many places) have a great middle class life as an EE.

For me I ended up starting a business. It was extremely exciting, but the downside is it was like peeling away the nice facade that is the middle class and realising that most of the people who run the show are somewhere between an immature 2 year old who keeps throwing their toys out of the cot, and an ice cold sociopath who will hunt you down and destroy your life in a completely non-sensical way if you happen to stubble into the path of whatever it is they think they were born to do in life.

Now I just find it hard to take anything seriously, including the whole notion of 'financial security'. There is no such thing unless you are Kim Jong Un and own your own country (even then...). The true escape from this life is to realise it is all a crazy game that most people take too seriously, and that we will all die in a pretty short amount of time.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[Pulzar]

The days of being able to do neat engineering work just got less and less, and as you get older you quickly realise that nobody generally wants to create the 'next big thing'. They just want to do a bunch of small marketing driven improvements to maintain profits for as long as possible and sweat capital (just look at the iPhone/iPad).

It's funny that you use the iPhone/iPad as examples, since they were exactly products of somebody trying to build the 'next big thing' (and succeeding). I don't think you can blame them for just evolving those products, as they are obviously still trying to also go for the next big thing again (watch, tv, car, vr, whatever).

I'm not a fan of Apple, but to say that they are not trying to create new things is a really skewed way to look at it, IMO.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[Anonymous Coward]

In short. No, you can't actually pursue goals that are not immediately profitable or goals that aren't monetarily profitable. You're still fucked if you are in the gap between "holding a steady job" and "actually managed to get through the enormous hurdles of disability". You're not talking UBI, you're talking a broad and bloated version of EITC with the similarity being superficial.

Having to do busywork with a huge bureaucracy insuring that people are doing busywork and creating elaborate rules as to what qualified busywork is comes from the same school of thought that wastes money on drug testing food stamp beneficiaries. Though I congratulate you on coming up with a more populist yet less practical UBI alternative.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[Compholio]

... Fun experiment, ask a lazy person do help you and see how fast they are busy that day. ...

I am most interested in this because I find that lazy people get in the way of real work since you make them look bad if you get anything done. It would be very interesting to have the workplace composed solely of the people that actually wanted to be there.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[monkeyxpress]

I meant that the iPhone/iPad were the sorts of fun projects that most engineers would love to have worked on when they were first designed, but now it is just 'make it thinner' and 'remove a connector' incremental engineering. Nothing against Apple - it just illustrates that even the most NBT companies still end up with lots of jobs that are very boring.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[shawn2772]

money for nothing is a bad idea

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The only way to know for sure is to discard anecdote-based assertions like yours and do the research.

However, I think research on this topic has to be done on a larger scale and a longer duration. A five-year study might tell you a few things but the participants are going to make their decisions around that five-year time horizon. Also, scattered individual participants will likely act differently than people would in a society where everyone understood that work was optional.

I know that some people will always work. Myself and my mom for example. My two sisters probably wouldn't. My ex wife, a childhood friend, and a few others I know all avoid work as much as possible.

Even if you're absolutely right that only a smallish percentage of people would choose to work, if projections that automation will make it unnecessary for most people to work are correct, isn't that exactly what we'll need? Figuring out what that percentage is and what the others will choose to do seems like really useful research.

Personally, I think that most people do enjoy working, as long as they're doing something they find challenging and useful. I think it's part of human nature that people want to be productive, if for no other reason than to gain the respect of others. I think most of the people who don't want to work now don't want to because they feel like society tries to force them to do it against their will, and only offers them boring, repetitive or unpleasant work. They get social affirmation from others who feel similarly put-upon. I don't know if that would be the case if no one had to work.

Also, it's worth considering that UBI can never provide more than the basics, by definition, because whatever level of income UBI provides will become the definition of "basic". It's likely that what's considered "basic" 50 years from now will seem luxurious by today's standards, but it will still be basic, and anyone who wants more will have to earn it, through work.

I think if I didn't need an income I'd still do exactly what I am doing today. I used to think that I'd leave the corporate world and write open source software in a less structured environment, but I think working for a large corporation (Google) provides me with leverage that I wouldn't have in another context, and thereby increases my ability to make contributions to the world. Also, although I presently need to work in order to live, my work provides me with a much higher standard of living than "basic", which I enjoy and would also be willing to work to receive.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[Daemonik]

People always point to someone else and say "they don't work" or "they're wasting their money".. it's usually never that simple. Our system of employment is very hit or miss, and isn't really capable of even determining what jobs a person would be good at or find interesting.

Fun experiment, ask a person if they are busy that day and offer them some money to help you instead of assuming they should for free, see how fast they come over. Your "lazy person" may have just figured out that busting their ass for nothing isn't the best thing they can do with their time.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[kheldan]

Hear, hear!

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[Lanforod]

Mr. Money Moustache follower?

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[Actually, I do RTFA]

, however money for nothing is a bad idea.

Way to beg the question.

It's entirely possible that the extra work done by the few innovators not flipping burgers offsets the other costs to all the lazy people. And society as a whole benefits.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[xtal]

Basic income. Not retirement. My definition is clear. Computers are basically free and offer unlimited entertainment and creative outlet (and income!) options.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[jedidiah]

Also, it is important to have some degree of financial independence simply so that you can survive the occasional reversal of fortune. If you are living paycheck to paycheck then you are always on the brink of disaster and the slightest little hiccup could cause your life to fall apart.

Even being part of the way of the rat race puts you in a better position to deal with life's little surprises. Just deciding to save something for a rainy day can make all the difference in the world. It can help you avoid bankruptcy and prevent you from becoming yet another digital beggar.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[narcc]

Everyone I know on disability is doing a big fat nothing to help the world that helps them. This is wrong.

They're disabled. That means they're limited in some physical or mental way that prevents them from performing tasks a person without said disability can perform.

Further, not all (or even most) disabled people do nothing. I suspect that the majority want to contribute. It's just human nature. Some disabled people can do certain kinds of work, but many cannot due to circumstances arising from their disability. (Transportation being a major issue.) I know one kid, very bright, who suffers from a pretty bad degenerative physical disability. Even writing and typing are tedious and difficult for him, due to the nature of his disorder. Unfortunately, the assistance he'd need to be successful academically (and he's quite capable) are out of his reach, not being born to a wealthy family, or in a country that properly cares for its citizens. Still, he does what he can to improve himself, learning what he can on his own, even though his efforts are unlikely to affect anyone other than himself. We are not providing him with an opportunity to succeed, you say that he "is doing a big fat nothing to help the world that helps them."

I'd also question the belief that it's wrong for a society to help those unable to help themselves. No one stands on their own. There are no true individualists. We are all unable to help ourselves, and we all benefit from the contributions of others. What makes you believe that you're entitled to those benefits while others are not? Because you're able to work? What makes your work more valuable that the work of others? Do you measure it by salary? Are you certain that those who contribute the most to society through their work are the same ones who benefit the most monetarily? If not, why are you so certain that your contributions entitle you more than others?

I'm not against helping people, however money for nothing is a bad idea.

I think it's pretty clear that you are against helping people. The general claim you make that social welfare is a "bad idea" seems to cement that.

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Everyone I know on disability is doing a big fat nothing to help the world that helps them.

Do you know why they doing nothing? Retraining for a desk job might not be a viable option. It requires time and money. Often more money than a disabled person is able to afford. And even when one does retrain, it can be very hard to get employment. Also, the disability system has perverse incentives to not retrain (because, if you can be retrained, you are not (legally) disabled).

I know a former nurse who was force out of clinical practice due to an injury. At the time, she was lucky the hospital she worked at was willing to move her in to a clerical position. In the meantime, because, as a nurse, she had learned enough about pharmacy to qualify, she retrained as a pharmacist. Over time, continuing complications from her injury ultimately confined her a wheelchair. Despite the fact she could still do her job very well, the fact that she could not reach supplies on shelves above a certain height with out help caused her employer to lay her off. Unfortunately, there were no longer any "desk jobs" available that she qualifies for with out at least 2 years of expensive retraining - or she was over qualified. She did take classes, but could only afford 1 class at a time, so it took twice as long to retrain. Despite her efforts, potential employers are still not interested. Health care related employers consider her over qualified, while non-health care related employers are looking for people with 5+ years "industry experience" and/or are afraid she will try to return to healthcare related work. The only job she has been able to get is 10 hours/week as a minimum wage greeter in a retail store So, she's been forced to move back in with her parents - who have only a tiny one bedroom apartment.

How many other disabled people are in a similar situation? How many are afraid to even to even try, given how many of those who do try are treated?

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[rsborg]

People will work; it's in our natures.

I'm not sure I agree with your premise. I know that some people will always work. Myself and my mom for example. My two sisters probably wouldn't.

Are your sisters perhaps stay-at-home mothers? Because parents who stay at home to rear children have some pretty difficult jobs [1]:

Think you can’t put a price on motherhood? According to a new survey by Salary.com, a division of human resources consultant Kenexa, moms should be charging $115,000 per year for their work.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...

Re:Modified life plan for this goal..

[RyoShin]

I agree with the AC's post, but I think the statement should be rewritten as:

People will occupy themselves; it's in our natures.

I've yet to meet the person who likes boredom. Sure, as people get onto universal income ("mincome") and realize that they don't have to work at all to maintain a minimalist life, they might spend a few weeks vegging in front of the TV. But, eventually, most will get bored and actively seek out things to do. For many there might be a time-consuming hobby, some will find jobs (which are now much more subject to any semblance of a "free market", as minimum wages have gone out the window), but I think most will turn to volunteer efforts.

In any case, people will certainly avoid "work", where some middle-manager pushes you around or demands you work Saturdays or pays you a pittance while bringing home a fat paycheck, but they likely won't avoid effort entirely. A mincome would tremendously upset the power disparity between companies and employees (currently heavily in the favor of companies) and more clearly define what jobs society finds useful (garbage man? oh yeah. marketer? eh)

As a result of wanting to avoid "work" while still stretching their mincome, I think that hybrid co-ops/charities--which I'm calling "sharities"--will spring up everywhere. These will be organizations that offer non-financial goods/services (greenhouse, transportation, etc.), and people join in can receive the goods/services at cost (or, perhaps, even free) if they actively contribute (in labor or in $) and non-members can still use the good/service by paying a mark-up price.

Show Me The Money!!

[zenlessyank]

Where do I sign up??!! I will take your cash so you will feel better. I know I will feel better.

Probably won't work in the US

[DrYak]

Expect the concept being shut down in the US because of "looking like an evil commie plan" in 4... 3... 2... 1...

I won't be surprised if :
- This US experiment will be one of the first to happen actually in real life (given the speed of politics here around in Europe. Specially in Switzerland).
- This experiment will bring lots of useful data.
- Right wing politics won't let it be in the US.
- Meanwhile, northern european country (I would bet mostly on scandinavian and germanic) will manage to implement it successfully.
- By the time the US finally decides giving it a try Universal Basic Income will have been successfully implemented in the whole Europe (not only the Nordic countries which are already economically stable and successful nowadays and I my opinion prime candidate for success, but I bet even *Greece* and the like will get a working U.B.I. before the US stops considering automatically putting a "commie" tag attached to it).

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[phantomfive]

There's been a real life experiment before

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[jiriw]

Actually there already have been some experiments to look at the possible effects of a UBI. One of the more famous ones was in the '70's in Canada and, indeed, various Scandinavian countries and some other European countries are seriously looking into UBI. Finland was flirting with the idea nation-wide but they seem to have backed down a bit. Swiss citizens forced a referendum about the subject onto their government by collecting 125,000 signatures and in the Netherlands some municipalities want to experiment with it.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[BarbaraHudson]

It was tried in Canada with positive outcomes

A final report was never issued, but Manitoban economist Evelyn Forget conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011. She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidents of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals.

Imagine that?

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[ThosLives]

The problem with that experiment is that it wasn't done in an enclosed system - that population was able to import goods and services from outside its local geographic area.

Does that study include a trade balance change for the population, or a change in real wealth produced?

Without seeing that data, I would wager that population group became more of a resource sink.

Yes, I can definitely see benefits of lower work stress and the like, but did the population that was given "mincome" maintain its previous output, or did it reduce? I didn't see that in the Forget report.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[jcdr]

For the Swiss popular initiative "For a unconditional base income" ( https://www.admin.ch/ch/f/pore... ) this is far far away from anything usable. The text is just 3 lines that say in short that the government must make a law the make this possible, without giving any hint on how to archive the goal. Knowing how the Swiss politic work, there is absolutely no chance at all that this particular text will be approved in votation.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[jiriw]

There are a variety of monetary (re)sources and taxations which could be used into a system of UBI. Which ones will be used, will depend on politics and public support, if there is going to be a UBI implemented at all. Possibilities are:

-Money currently spent on various welfare subsidies (unemployment benefits, disability benefits, basic welfare for people without other sources of income... Most of them are currently strictly regulated, which also cost a lot in bureaucratic resources).
-Countries with abundant natural resources or profitable publicly/state owned industry could use a kind of citizens dividend.
-Changes in income based taxation - probably means the income rich will have to pay even more...
Instead of taxes based on income, which is currently the norm, more:
-Taxation of total personal capital (with, for example, modifiers based on age so people can build up a pension) - which means there will be a limit to how much capital an individual can hold realistically and any corporation larger than that threshold will have to be owned by multiple individuals or slowly be bled dry - it will play havoc on our current corporate structure...
-Taxation on positive production and/or capital gain - which will, of course, mean it will be less interesting to invest capital in risky endeavours (because the larger gain will be taxed progressively more) and automated production may 'flee' to countries where there's less taxation. Then, again, it may stop the trend of companies sacrificing their assets, customers and future prospects for a quick dividend paid to their share holders.

Of course thinking about all of this and the possible consequences it has is fun... I'm not sure if implementing is (for one group of people or another).

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[BarbaraHudson]

Under Canada's universal health care plan, and 8.5% reduction in hospital visits is the opposite of a resource sink. The reductions in car accidents are also the opposite of a resource sink, unless you want to use the broken window fallacy to say that body shops and wreckers are losing money. The improvements in graduation rates are a positive investment. Much better than throwing out the years of investment that are wasted when someone drops out.

If you had read the article I linked to, you would have known that the only people who worked less were students and new mothers. Contrast that with the reduction in work days lost and lowered payouts due to work accident hospitalizations and visits, lowered domestic violence, and fewer mental health problems and their related costs under the universal health care plan.

Look, unless we do something to reduce the number of hours each person works, we're going to be looking at 50% unemployment by 2040. Are you really looking forward to a workforce participation rate under 30% from 62% now, not counting those who no longer participate in the economy (unemployed too long, disabled, unemployable, pensioners, retirees, etc). After you subtract the 7% who work for the various levels of government, that would leave 23% of the working-age population paying for the other 77%, plus the pensioners, etc.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[BarbaraHudson]

It was only some, and nowhere near a significant number. Do you have a problem with ignoring something that is relatively insignificant?

And the Canada of 2016 is still a lot like the Canada of 1970 despite Harper trying to destroy it. Universal health care is still here last time I looked. The rest of the country wants to copy the universal drug plans of several provinces. We still don't tolerate religious interference in politics. We still have gun control, and much lower murder rates than the US. We still have a far lower per capita incarceration rate than the US (which ranks as #1, but who's counting)? We're finally going to enact the recommendations of the Le Dain commission that recommended the decriminalization of simple possession (majority) or outright legalization (minority) of weed. Quebec's separatists are still a pain in the butt at times. About the only difference is that we've changed the status of part of the north-west territories to the new territory of Nunavut, and we're going to introduce proportional representation.

As far as being "far from 2016 USA", we see that as a benefit, same as in the 70s.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[ThosLives]

High employment at reduced hours (the supposed solution to pending 50% unemployment) can't work unless prices for things is allowed to drop, because basically nobody can afford their current basket of goods and services on 50% of their current income.

UBI can't work unless you do other corresponding crazy things like force the maximum term on a mortgage to 5 years, and don't flip out when housing costs drop dramatically...

Or perhaps if you force companies to keep employing people rather than lay them off when productivity increases.

Basically I'm looking for real solutions that don't involve use of force or government takeover (or mob rule) that make mathematical sense.

If you know of such a formula or plan... I'm really interested to hear it, because it's beyond my capacity to think of it.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[BarbaraHudson]

The prices of things will most certainly drop with increased automation. The huge problem even now is deflation.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[ThosLives]

Don't confuse price drops with deflation - in fact, if prices are dropping due to increases in productivity (and competition) that is progress, not deflation. Right now we have price drops in equities and oil, but just about everything else has its prices increasing. (And yes, I know that drops in commodities and equities can trigger layoffs and such, reducing demand and causing actual deflation).

But, deflation is usually only bad because of long-term debt or if you are a producer of durable goods; if we had a different debt repayment system, especially for consumer debt, deflation would not be as big a concern and would be fairly self-correcting. See my other posts in this thread that cover that - if you could change your debt payments as fast as demand changes, there would be far less impact.

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[BarbaraHudson]

Japan is experiencing deflation in many areas, whereas they should have benefited from lower oil costs. That's why both the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank are into negative interest rates. It's why even the fed is worried and using negative interest rates as one scenario for bank stress tests

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[ThosLives]

Well, Japan is suffering from population (and therefore overall demand) collapse; deflation makes sense there if production is consistently higher than demand.

And I don't care what the Fed or any other central bank is doing: Paying people to take your money (negative interest rates) is a completely irrational act, and betrays one of the core tenets of economics, that of rational actors. As the saying goes, "You may give someone an apple in exchange for two apples in the future, you might give someone an apple in exchange for an apple in the future, but you're a fool if you give someone two apples now in exchange for one apple in the future."

I understand that negative interest rates are seen as just another way to increase money supply (and not without limits; they are only an artificial result of the cost of holding cash). The problem is increased money supply can either go to increased consumption / production, or it can simply go into bank accounts and inflated asset prices. Based on the past 8 years, where do you think the existing money supply increases have gone? Why is there any rational belief that negative interest rates will change that?

Re:Probably won't work in the US

[BarbaraHudson]

but you're a fool if you give someone two apples now in exchange for one apple in the future

Really? So if we have plentiful stocks of apples now, but I have information that a disease is going to kill off most of the apple trees, I'm a fool to hedge my apple supply?

Negative interest rates are used because in theory when a bank chooses to park their money with a central bank, rather than the central bank paying interest, it's charging for the privilege, goading the bank, in theory, to instead lend out the money even at a very low interest rate.

Of course, this is theory, and it doesn't work, because it doesn't put money into consumer's hands to buy things, just more debt, so consumers won't be stimulated to buy things if they know that they won't have the monthly income to cover even a portion of the principle on an interest-free loan, and it will probably be either the same price or cheaper in the future as deflation sets in.

We've seen this plenty of times in, for example, electronics. Why buy a new computer or tv when you can wait 6 months and get an even better one for less, unless you either absolutely need it or you're one of those "early adopters", or your business can write it off?

A lot more twitter, TV, drinking, & sex

[tanstaaf1]

This has been tested to death. Yes, there will be some outliers - some few people who will use the opportunity to expand their horizons. But that is mostly a matter of will. And will tends to actually decline, for the vast majority of people, when there is not urgency. The vast majority of people will no longer have as much reason to get out of bed in the morning, much less work up a sweat.

This would ultimately be one of the problems of life extension for everybody, btw. Most people are already wasting most of the life they have. Reducing urgency will produce more waste. It's an absurd experiment; try conducting it on rats and see what you get before you scale. Or is there more of a meaningful experiment here than it might otherwise seem? One would hope so. Y-combinator must surely be more clever than to re-try the Morlock-Eloi angle.

Re:A lot more twitter, TV, drinking, & sex

[Actually, I do RTFA]

What's wrong with people spending time on twitter, TV, drinking & sex. All of technological progress is, in theory, supposed to be about increasing how much time I spend doing fun things. And I try not to judge what people do that makes them happy.

Or do you think the only purpose of people is to toil in pain because someone ate an apple 6000 years ago?

Re:A lot more twitter, TV, drinking, & sex

[BarbaraHudson]

This has been tested to death. Yes, there will be some outliers - some few people who will use the opportunity to expand their horizons. But that is mostly a matter of will. And will tends to actually decline, for the vast majority of people, when there is not urgency. The vast majority of people will no longer have as much reason to get out of bed in the morning, much less work up a sweat.

This would ultimately be one of the problems of life extension for everybody, btw. Most people are already wasting most of the life they have. Reducing urgency will produce more waste. It's an absurd experiment; try conducting it on rats and see what you get before you scale. Or is there more of a meaningful experiment here than it might otherwise seem? One would hope so. Y-combinator must surely be more clever than to re-try the Morlock-Eloi angle.

Too bad that the facts disagree with you. The people who worked less were teenagers (resulting in more kids graduating) and new mothers. Couple that with the money saved by an 8.5% reduction in hospital visits, fewer hospitalizations from car accidents and domestic abuse, fewer work-related injuries, increased adult education, and improved mental health.

It would be insane not to repeat this experiment on a wider scale.

Time limit too short

[phantomfive]

They will only be paying people for five years. If someone paid me for five years, I would be constantly worried about what would happen at the end of five years. I wouldn't want to re-enter the workforce with degraded skills, etc.

But if I knew I would be getting that money for the rest of my life, it very likely would affect my habits.

Re:Time limit too short

[BarbaraHudson]

Of course it would affect your habits! People would in a better position to be selective about what jobs you take, forcing employers to stop the race to the bottom. People working fewer days would mean more work spread around, so less unemployment. More time to improve your skills if you so choose, or to work on family life so you avoid the costs (financial and emotional) of a divorce later down the road. Less stress.

When this was done in Manitoba, there was an 8.5% decrease in hospital visits. That's a LOT of money. More kids graduated. Less domestic violence and fewer car accidents. Seems to me that the ones who would be most against this are insurance companies and lawyers.

Re:Time limit too short

[RyoShin]

With a minimum income, you'd be free to take more risks seeking work; you'd also be more able to walk away from a job with an abusive employer. You could take more time to personally hone your skills and take up hobbies that exemplify them (for instance, if you're a programmer, you could contribute to open source projects.) If the income is enough, or you get a part-time job, you might go (back) to school to get or finish a degree. You'd also have the ability to heavily involve yourself in something that was previously a cursory hobby and potentially turn it into a career.

It might take you a year to deal with the mind-shift, where your job no long occupies a large portion (perhaps the majority) of your thoughts. Of course, if getting the guaranteed income truly worries you, with this experiment you could just move out of the area.

Someone who would squander five years of economic release would squander 50 years of the same.

If it were that easy

[Masked Coward]

If economic problems could be solved by such simplistic policies, it would have been done thousands of years ago and we wouldn't be discussing it.

Virtually no one takes pleasure in the suffering of others caused by economic circumstances, and likewise we fight for our own economic stability. When I think about the benefits of getting rich (which I am not), it's not about the stuff I can buy. It's the peace of mind that comes with having more control over my own circumstances, knowing that I'm not one unfortunate event away from ruin.

Yes, there are some who gain their standing by exploiting others, but I can't buy into the narrative that people who have money are generally greedy and don't want anyone else to have it. And since I have a basic understanding of economics, I know for certain that a universally guaranteed income solves nothing and is just a feel-good pipe dream

Re:If it were that easy

[blue9steel]

If economic problems could be solved by such simplistic policies, it would have been done thousands of years ago and we wouldn't be discussing it.

Nonsense. In order for a UBI to make sense, you need A) Sufficient economic surplus that you can actually afford to pay one and B) Not be labor constrained. Neither of those conditions applied until very recently.

Re:If it were that easy

[ThosLives]

In order for a UBI to make sense, you need A) Sufficient economic surplus that you can actually afford to pay one and B) Not be labor constrained.

Sort of - but who is the "you" that is affording to pay the UBI? Is it those people who control the means of production?

Who is going to make them keep producing things for which they don't get any benefit? If you are not forcing someone to produce, it boils down to what the owners of means of production see as a reasonable price (in terms of excess production) to pay instead of having to erect private defenses to fend off the mobs that want to take control over the means of production.

So you actually do end up with an "unfair" system (for some definitions of fairness) where people who are willing to work do indeed simply give the fruit of their labor to people who don't want to work.

But what is more "fair" (if fairness is your goal): forcing people to give the fruit of their labor to others, or simply letting physics and chemistry take its course and have people who are unwilling to produce anything die off due to lack of resources?

Re:If it were that easy

[tricorn]

One could argue that the people with the majority of the income and wealth are there because they "forced people to give the fruits of their labor" to them. Most people living paycheck to paycheck work a lot harder than a lot of the fabulously wealthy ever did.

Re:If it were that easy

[ThosLives]

Right - but when I talk about wealth I talk about actual wealth, like food or a factory - not money.

Most "wealthy" people today don't actually control means of production, so they would be hard-pressed to actually survive. Especially because they probably don't have anything for which famers really would want to trade.

Also - most wealthy people do not force people to give them large chunks of their money - they get their money by large amounts of people giving them small amounts.

I'm not sure what you mean by people being forced to give the fruits of their labor to the rich - it's partly voluntary, as in, choosing to work for a company because it's easier to get a job for an existing company than trying to start your own. Now - I do say partly voluntary, because it is indeed very difficult to start a new company and have it be successful, but there is still some choice involved. If there truly is indeed no choice*, then we should address that issue. I'd much rather see that before forcibly taking people's wealth via taxes.

*Some examples here would be, zoning boards preventing you from growing your own food, deed restrictions, and other regulatory barriers to entry.

Re:If it were that easy

[ultranova]

If economic problems could be solved by such simplistic policies, it would have been done thousands of years ago and we wouldn't be discussing it.

It was called "bread and circuses" back then.

Virtually no one takes pleasure in the suffering of others caused by economic circumstances,

They don't have to take pleasure from it, just decide it's both necessary and an acceptable price for their own prosperity, real or imagined.

But even beyond that, humans feel peer pressure to conform, and in the West that means accepting capitalism as a de facto religion - and the mythology of capitalism says capitalism is a meritocracy based on productivity, productivity is all that matters, and anyone can increase their productivity by simply working harder, thus the poor earn their misery through moral failure. In our society, poverty is considered a divine punishment douled out by the Invisible Hand, thus doing anything about it calls into question the very secular religion which serves as its foundation: capitalism.

So it's a combination of base greed and superstition masquerading as rationality.

And since I have a basic understanding of economics, I know for certain that a universally guaranteed income solves nothing and is just a feel-good pipe dream

Every society needs to provide the basic necessities of its members, or disappear from starvation. Every society that clears that hurdle then needs to provide a quality of life deemed sufficient by its members so they don't openly rebel. And every society that wishes to stay competitive with its potential rivals needs to provide a quality of life that allows luxuries consistently, because then some of that luxury spending will be early adopters trying stuff innovators just came up with rather than the safe stuff you can always get later even if this doesn't work.

All Universal Basic Income does is institutionalize those concepts and reduce uncertainty.

Re:If it were that easy

[blue9steel]

choosing to work for a company because it's easier to get a job for an existing company than trying to start your own.

More importantly it prevents starvation and homelessness which is the practical alternative for most.

Re:If it were that easy

[blue9steel]

Sort of - but who is the "you" that is affording to pay the UBI?

Society as a whole. It needs to be sufficiently productive that there are resources left over after basic needs are met. Most societies throughout history struggled to meet even the basic needs of the population. The developed world has reached this point, the emerging market is swiftly moving in that direction, while the frontier markets are still struggling.

Re:If it were that easy

[tricorn]

Money is a proxy for control of allocation of resources. People with a lot of money got there in a variety of ways. They may have just been lucky (by birth or otherwise). They may even have worked very hard, but it's unlikely that Bill Gates worked 4.5 million times harder than someone working a couple part-time minimum wage jobs. The rewards you get are not proportionate to the effort you put in.

Does that mean that people shouldn't be able to make a lot of money? No. It just means they should give back more to the society that let them succeed than just a straight equal percentage of their income.

Re:If it were that easy

[GameboyRMH]

Yes, there are some who gain their standing by exploiting others, but I can't buy into the narrative that people who have money are generally greedy and don't want anyone else to have it.

Well bad news, they are in fact greedy and seek greater inequality to make themselves feel relatively wealthier. It's evident in many of the goods and services they buy, they're expensive just for the sake of expense. Exotic pets that cost more than a worker could make in a month, no better as pets than any rescued from an animal shelter. Watches that cost more than a worker could make in a year, no better-looking than a $100 watch and no better at telling the time than a $5 watch. Opulent cars which cost more than a worker could make in a lifetime, most of which are objectively better in some way, but are mostly used to get from A to B like any other car which is orders of magnitude cheaper.

There's no function to the kind of wealth they seek other than to satisfy greed and flaunt that satisfaction.

Re:If it were that easy

[ThosLives]

Ah, ok, I think I understand from where you are coming now. But there's a caveat that "society as a whole" doesn't really produce anything - a large collection of individual producers produce things (regardless if you have private or public ownership of means of production).

So I agree that we do have sufficient current production to distribute that production to everyone, but when you get out of the aggregate and down to the individual producer, how do you avoid moral hazard - both from the standpoint of those taking the production from those who produce and from the standpoint of the producers, resisting giving to those with a need and no way to repay it?

These are real questions by the way, not rhetorical...

Re:If it were that easy

[blue9steel]

when you get out of the aggregate and down to the individual producer, how do you avoid moral hazard - both from the standpoint of those taking the production from those who produce and from the standpoint of the producers, resisting giving to those with a need and no way to repay it?

Moral Hazard, a situation in which one party gets involved in a risky event knowing that it is protected against the risk and the other party will incur the cost, is not an issue here, though it certainly played a role in the financial crisis.

Tax policy is never an easy thing, but in general you would need something fairly broad based and non-discriminatory. A reasonable example might be a VAT tax, though I'm not claiming that's the ideal solution. The size of the UBI would need to be controlled so that it doesn't outgrow the productive surplus of the economy, a classic failure of socialist policies. At present, setting the rate at a level that would produce an income equal to the living wage is probably the appropriate choice. This would be high enough to ensure the basic needs of all citizens but low enough that anyone with any sort of ambition or talent would seek additional income through employment.

At a very rough estimate this might cost $4 Trillion a year which would require a 23% VAT tax. If it was coupled with elimination of the minimum wage and all forms of government assistance, this could actually cost quite a bit less and actually increase rather than reduce the free market nature of the economy as well as shifting a reasonable amount of bargaining power away from capital and towards labor. (it's been going the other way for some time now) Most people would still work, though there would be a number of major realignments in prices and markets.

Re:If it were that easy

[ThosLives]

Ok, perhaps it's not technically Moral Hazard; I might have gotten my phrases wrong. But the point should have been clear: you either take wealth by force (or threat of force) or you let your fellow man starve to death. Both of those are "moral" issues.

Secondly - VAT is terrible. It punishes consumption and doesn't really do anything to "naturally" reallocate wealth to society. And a 23% VAT is really quite high, especially if you are a lower-income person. If you spend 100% of your income on goods, you'd be paying at least 23% - far above the current levels for lower tax brackets. And if you say, well, there will be an exemption up to some level of income... then you are right back where our current taxes are, arbitrarily picking threshold values.

You've also said "UBI needs to be controlled so that it doesn't outgrow the productive surplus" - also terrible. Any time you have a system that isn't self-correcting, you've got an issue. A good system needs to be self-correcting without intervention, because if it requires intervention then it will be abused.

When it comes to UBI, my fundamental problem is still this: who decides what the "living wage" is? How do you prevent prices for those basic goods from rising? Partly this goes back to the "intervention" concept - if you have to do analyses to calculate a "cost of living" increase, you've already lost the war.

Now, I agree that it would be very nice to see power shift back toward the masses from the few, but I would do it by ensuring that labor always earns capital so that all laborers are automatically capital owners. I would not try to threaten the capital owners.

Perhaps something like if a corporation hires you, it must include shares as part of your wage in addition to cash (so no "stock only" compensation). Or perhaps, in the interest of UBI, a corporation must have a percentage of its shares (maybe 10%? something significant, but non-controlling) owned by the public.

You could do other things too, like limit mortgage terms to 10 or 15 years (long-term debt is dangerous), or mandate that wage reductions must occur before wholesale layoffs (10 jobs at 90% pay is arguably better for society than 9 jobs at 100% and 1 job at 0).

There are other radical things, like all prices could be done in % of your salary for a time period, rather than in a fixed nominal amount.

Re:If it were that easy

[Ice Tiger]

But it's not a model of communism, what if it was funded by the government buying shares across the economy. What if instead of owing $4bil the top percentage now only kept $1bil, would that stop them bothering, would it stop you? With the current model we're looking to be where there will be a mass die off of the population with increasing automation and wealth going to the top percentage of the top 1%. I doubt you're a billionaire so is that the future you want for you and yours?

Re:If it were that easy

[blue9steel]

If you believe that surplus population should starve to death then we're never going to see eye to eye.

Re:If it were that easy

[david_thornley]

: Actually, I don't see that many people who don't work because they don't want to work. I see people who don't work because they can't find a decent job. The usual clamor has been about quality jobs. People in general seem to want the opportunity to help produce stuff and take a reasonable cut, not the opportunity to sit around doing nothing and consuming.

They are already running the experiment for years!

[grumpyman]

Can't think of it as a pure goodwill/social thing... VC is not going to run the government. I'd be thinking what possible 'business model' there would be, say signing new-grads up for this and restrict them to study/work with certain orgs, and reap benefits there? Seems like Y combinator is already doing something similar: paying meager contribution to keep 2-3 'founders' alive while work their ass off? They are simply expanding on the idea on accelerator. Instead of working for 1 start-up and for a very short time (4 months?), they capture the best of the best and let them work in many opportunities over longer time.

Basic income, not universal services.

[Kwyj1b0]

I'm curious as to how a small study might provide insight when you apply it to a non-self contained ecosystem.

It is one thing to offer basic income, but unless you price control basic necessities (housing, food cost, clothing) I fail to see how the system works. In a small pilot (say a few hundred people in a city) it might work out that basic income is great (since prices are set by the majority).

To be clear, I'm not against the principle of a universal basic standard of living: I think society would be better off if people didn't have to waste time doing dead-end jobs just to avoid starvation. But for society to really benefit from basic services, I think it would take a few generations for the good effects to be seen (the first generation of poor people who have been getting shafted all their lives are very likely to just kick back and enjoy; but when the second generation - those who have been learning and doing stuff out of interest their whole lives - comes around, they are likely to do good work with their free time).

Re:Basic income, not universal services.

[ThosLives]

Yeah, this is one of my points of contention with UBI. Essentially I think it belies an incomplete understanding of the problem space. Namely: money doesn't equal wealth, although it is related to it.

A good example is how universal health insurance doesn't really ensure that everyone has health care: it only affects the demand side, not the supply side.

Unless there is something about UBI that addresses the question of "How do you ensure that production of goods and services is maintained at the same level - or increases - when you switch to UBI?" I think it's only an interesting exercise, not something that can be sustained.

Re:Basic income, not universal services.

[bigCstyle]

Because its *basic income. People like money, and like buying crap they don't really need. It also has some benefits by cutting a lot of expense from administrating all the programs that try to assist the working/poor etc.

Re:Basic income, not universal services.

[ultranova]

It is one thing to offer basic income, but unless you price control basic necessities (housing, food cost, clothing) I fail to see how the system works. In a small pilot (say a few hundred people in a city) it might work out that basic income is great (since prices are set by the majority).

The more your spending is affected by basic income, the more likely you are to spend it on housing, food and clothing. This means there's increased demand for these items while the demand for other items is unaffected. This causes prices of these items to rice, which causes production to become more economically viable, which causes an increase in production, which halts the rise of prices. The end result is that production priorities have been altered so the poor have more housing, food and clothing, while the rich have slightly less luxuries. Except the ones who invested in providing housing, food and clothing, who are making a killing.

Re:Basic income, not universal services.

[Ice Tiger]

"How do you ensure that production of goods and services is maintained at the same level - or increases - when you switch to UBI" - automation, it is happening right now without UBI and you can see the effect in terms of increasing productivity equaling stagnant wages and decreasing wealth in real terms for the majority over time.

That everyone who "invests" in it is a moron

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> What do you think about the significance?

That everyone who "invests" in it is a moron.

Also, that over half the participants will be magically be someone's brother-in-law, cousin, college buddy, or connected to someone at the sponsoring firm.

You want to see a real-life experiment in "universal basic income"? Go visit the "streets and san" division in Chicago and nearby suburbs.

Paying for this

[DrYak]

who pays for this? are you guys insane!

The key idea that proponent speak about, is that currently, the countries are already paying for this.

Remember, except for TFA's Y Combinator, most of the countries where this idea is debated are nothern european countries with very stable and successful economies, and with very advanced social welfare programs.

Those countries are already paying lots of money in the form of various aids (such as, e.g.: unemployment aids, child support, medical aids)
The idea is to simplify this to the extreme and achieve economies by cutting infrastructure. Instead of having heavy bureaucracies in charge of re-distributing the aids and determining who needs what, simply set a ground universal basic income. The money saved by needing less infrastructure could go instead into more aid (or U.B.I.).
(Or so goes the idea).

Of course whether it could work in practice is left to be seen. It's probably going to take ages until the whole system has been correctly calibrated and works as it should without losing money.
I'm not certain even if indeed this going to end up working eventually.

(I'm only certain that the US will be one of the last bastion against it because considering it "commie" stuff)

Re:Paying for this

[Dog-Cow]

Even in the European countries you mention, do all adults receive social benefits anywhere near whatever UBI is under consideration? Figuring out how to pay for a UBI is important, no matter which country you're talking about.

Let's take the US as an example. The current population is around 320 million. If you discount legal dependents (children), you're somewhere around 200 million. Let's consider a UBI of $10,000/yr. In parts of the country that wouldn't even cover rent, but it's high enough for illustration. To give 200 million that amount per year, the US Federal government would be doling out 2 trillion in cash. The US Federal budget for 2015 was 3.8 trillion. You're talking about providing over 50% of that budget in cash payments. That same budget pays salaries, medical care, defense, grants, education, etc.

Re:Paying for this

[visualight]

I don't think that math adds up.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...

Re:Paying for this

[q4Fry]

I like how you linked to a calculator that agrees with Dog-Cow's number.
It says 2e+12, which is 2 * 10^12 which is a 2 with 12 zeros.

2,000 <-- two thousand (3 zeros)
2,000,000 <-- two million (6 zeros)
2,000,000,000 <-- two billion (9 zeros)
2,000,000,000,000 <-- two trillion (12 zeros)

And this is with 10k/person*year which is less than a thousand bucks a month. In my town, you could live in a room in a scary part of town, eat hot dogs and rice, shop at a thrift store 3-4 times a year, and maybe own a simple cell phone. If you have kids (which Dog-Cow specifically excluded from his/her calculations), they starve until you find a job and a way to get there.

I think UBI sounds good. The problem is that it is unconscionably expensive. Dog-Cow's post describes a system in which half the Federal budget still isn't enough to sustain a disabled single parent.

yea yea

[desperados]

i think this should be implemented with everybody only in very small steps. Start giving $10 to EVERYONE. And just increase it gradually. After we approach a dangerous threshold were loads of people start to quit their job, ok, then slow down.

Alternative, negative tax rate.

[Hussman32]

Someone posted on Twitter an interesting alternative to UBI; adopting a negative tax rate. I.e., if your income is below a threshold, then you are paid money by the government instead of paying taxes. This would prevent people from getting the UBI if they didn't need it, and also provide for those who need the assistance.

Re:Alternative, negative tax rate.

[swb]

When I've looked into this, it often works just like that (which, in theory, the earned income tax credit is supposed to do, sort of).

What I've read about that stuck in my head is that everyone earns a basic income, whether you have a job or not.

The tax rate goes up to basically negate the basic income at some point, so if you were in some high-income job your tax rate would go up enough that at net you wouldn't be earning the basic income.

The genius I saw was that there was a reasonable threshold, though, on money earned above the basic income to maintain an incentive to work. If the basic income was, say, $20,000 per year and you got a low paying job making another $10,000 per year you would pay something in taxes, but not so much that you didn't end up netting more than the basic income.

This allow for an incentive to work, prevents people from being "working poor" -- ie, people who work full time at low paying jobs but still have trouble feeding themselves or paying rent, and forces businesses to raise salaries and/or improve working conditions to attract workers so that the burden of work is less than the payoff.

I also think it would push other middle-range salaries up, as there may be talented people who would rather work less (at lesser-skilled or less demanding jobs or fewer hours) than work harder at more demanding jobs whose burden exceeded the payoff.

As I read it, the larger goal is to decrease inequality by raising the cost of labor.

Re:Alternative, negative tax rate.

[tricorn]

A UBI is equivalent to a negative income tax, since everyone gets that standard deduction. With a UBI you'd eliminate the standard deduction, just roll it into the UBI itself. I first came up with the idea (before I found out that it had been around for a long time) when thinking of ways to simplify the income tax system.

A flat tax is really simple, everything can simply be deducted, no forms to fill out, no worries about multiple jobs changing your tax bracket or deductions. A flat tax is regressive, so to fix it you put in a large standard deduction, but that ends up complicating withholding again.

So, instead, just have the government automatically refund you the tax on your deductible amount. If you allow that even for people who didn't make that much, you have a UBI.

With a flat tax, you get much higher compliance and much lower cost of enforcing compliance. My goal would be to eliminate all tax forms for anyone who isn't actually self employed or running a business. That includes things like having charitable organizations receive tax money directly from the government instead of the donor taking a deduction (which also means a contribution from a poor person is just as valuable as from a wealthy person, who can donate more since the government pays them back a significant portion).

Fortunately for all the tax preparation people, there'd be a UBI to hold them over until they could find work that's actually useful.

Re:Alternative, negative tax rate.

[Hussman32]

I first came up with the idea (before I found out that it had been around for a long time)

Heh, an entire industry in patent law exists because so many people do not do the research required by the parenthetical of your statement.

Re:Alternative, negative tax rate.

[david_thornley]

A flat tax only works on regular employment pay. It doesn't work for someone who earns money as a contractor or with a hobby or whatever.

If the flat tax is not to kill a lot of economic activity, it has to be on profit rather than revenue, when those differ. Deciding what is a legitimate business expense is hard.

You can't eat money

[iamacat]

If everyone's average income went up by 25%, all prices would just go up by 25% as well and folks would not be any better off. At this point, someone who has zero other income will not be able to support themselves, especially with increased prices, and will still need government services like shelter and food stamps.

We really need to focus on producing more healthy food, building housing, fixing roads and educating more teachers and doctors so that there are enough goods and services to go around.

Direct government aid only works when given to a small number of people for limited time. Universal income would make sense in a very wealthy society where someone can get decent food and shelter for 10% of an average salary. But we are not anywhere close to that.

Re:You can't eat money

[NEDHead]

What you are ignoring is a future where increased productivity has eliminated scarcity (see Star Trek for references). This is a real possibility given the exponential increase in the application of automation to all aspects of the economy. Not tomorrow perhaps, but not never for sure.

Re:You can't eat money

[MitchDev]

We don't have "replicators" that make something from nothing, Start Trek is a horrible comparison...

Re:You can't eat money

[NEDHead]

First off, Replicators don't make something from nothing. Secondly, if that is all the economic insight you got from watching Star Trek, perhaps you need to study a little harder.

Re:You can't eat money

[Bite The Pillow]

Thinking in percentages does not help. And, your math is wrong. It works that way for inflation overall because business chooses to keep wages stagnant. But the poors having money means it gets spent, with a multiplier effect which decreases the 1 for 1 inflation hikes.

Re:You can't eat money

[MitchDev]

Here's a BIG hint Star Trek is FICTION, It's not real. A lot of the so-called "economy" of Star Trek is based on the idea that scarcity is near non-existent since the replicators can convert your feces into what every you want.

Re:You can't eat money

[tricorn]

Everyone's income wouldn't go up by 25%, where do you get that?

You wouldn't institute a UBI without changes to taxes. First, you'd probably eliminate the personal exemption and standard deduction, roll that into the UBI instead. Second, you'd be eliminating a lot of support payments, e.g. SNAP. Third, you'd raise the tax rate overall - people below a certain income level would have a net gain, above would show a net loss. I'd guess it might be calibrated to be break-even here around $100K (single).

Re:You can't eat money

[Ice Tiger]

Except it isn't everyone's wage going up by 25%, does a minimum wage worker earn the same as the CEO of Alphabet?

Re:You can't eat money

[Ice Tiger]

But in the non fiction world we're reaching a point where automation is replacing labour in return for investment in capital, our economy however relies on labour receiving wages in order to buy things. The majority of peoples labour will become worthless as machines will do it for lower cost.

Re:You can't eat money

[MitchDev]

And the rich (who buy the laws and own the politicians) will never let any of this get into even the formative stage in government.

Re:You can't eat money

[david_thornley]

We're not talking about just increasing everyone's income by 25%. We're talking about a wealth redistribution scheme, in which the people as a whole don't have more money, but I pay more taxes and other people get some of it. My taxes are my civilization bill, and I'm happy to raise it for more civilization.

The description is a lie...

[pulse2600]

The money is not unconditional. First, the article does not specifically say they have decided on having no strings attached or not, just that they would prefer it that way. However even that is a lie. Right there in the summary, it says:

"Then, assessors will record life consequences like changes in work patterns, self-employment, artistic endeavors, or idleness".

If they are doing that, the money is not unconditional. You must provide this information or have someone study/watch what you do with your life. Those are conditions. Give me the money and expect nothing in return - that is unconditional. And this ladies and gentlemen is exactly why I don't want to live in a socialist shithole. If the nannystate provides us with our income or some portion of it, they will eventually (or immediately) require us to let them watch and analyze everything and anything we do with our lives. If you take this money, this is what you want for yourself and the rest of society. Period.

No one who takes this money values their freedom. I never want to hear anyone who would even consider taking this money bitch about the NSA, CIA, FBI, TSA, backdoors, cryptography, or neocon wingnuts....because these leftist moonbat experiments will truly destroy the freedom of all humanity.

Re:The description is a lie...

[Shawndeisi]

"Then, assessors will record life consequences like changes in work patterns, self-employment, artistic endeavors, or idleness".

If they are doing that, the money is not unconditional. You must provide this information or have someone study/watch what you do with your life. Those are conditions. Give me the money and expect nothing in return - that is unconditional.

Yes I agree that the study is flawed for that reason, as well as another parent poster's reason of the study being 5 years and not indefinite. People will need to better themselves or at least not slide backwards in order to ensure that they don't falter in 5 years when the money ends and they will potentially want to do more because they are being watched. Both of these affect the outcome.

And this ladies and gentlemen is exactly why I don't want to live in a socialist shithole. If the nannystate provides us with our income or some portion of it, they will eventually (or immediately) require us to let them watch and analyze everything and anything we do with our lives. If you take this money, this is what you want for yourself and the rest of society. Period.

Wait, what? The measurement is part of this study; Y-Combinator is doing this study to determine if policy should follow so they need to quantify the result. Government would only have to balance the books: do taxes bring in more than the basic income and all of the other expenses cost?

I'm not saying that if we enact a basic income it does not mean that we will not have a lot of the analysis (hell we're getting it with or without a basic income, at this rate), but it does not follow that it must be requirement for basic income.

Re:The description is a lie...

[eriks]

A UBI is not really "socialist" at all. In fact one of it's main proponents was one of the world's staunchest conservative capitalists, Milton Friedman:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think it's an idea to PRESERVE capitalism, which is getting a bit frayed around the edges -- as automation increases (think 100 years from now, not 10) there will be less and less "work" available. The solution will have to be either full-on socialism/collectivism, or continuing the status quo, with something like a UBI added to the mix to ensure that the teeming billions have enough money to actually, you know, buy stuff, not only just to survive, but to keep the economy rolling. See? It's not "socialism" at all, it's actually self-interest. A UBI would amount to a few more (large-ish) crumbs off GDP -- and the current "power elites" get to keep their position and status for another few generations or so without having to live like mole-people in underground bunkers while the rest of us quickly starve in the hell-scape produced by an irrevocable economic collapse -- not that that is a certainty, but it's an ever increasing risk with the status quo.

A couple hundred thousand multi-millionaires and billionaires can't possibly ever spend enough money to keep anything like the current economic system going, even if you forget about the billions of pissed-off proles.

Also think about the projected population stabilization: the economic system we have is predicated on growth. What will happen when the population stops growing?

A UBI would function as a feedback mechanism, to prop up the existing system long enough for humanity to realize an actual (more or less) post-scarcity global society. Without it (or something like it, or a literal miracle) I don't think we'll make it there as a species.

As far as government-collected statistics go for a UBI -- sure, there'd probably be some, but I'd doubt it would be any different than it is now, since we have to file a 1040 with the IRS every year anyway -- and if the information gathering were too much for an individual's sensibilities, I'd hope they'd simply not cash the checks, or opt out of the system, or donate 100% of it to charities, or whatever.

In at least one sense, it may be that something like a UBI would result in LESS government surveillance/data collection, since if the UBI were unconditional, there'd be no need to "check up" on anyone, like has to be done now for welfare and SSI/disability in order to discourage fraud.

As far as the Social Security Administration, et. al., not wanting to shut down, what exactly would they do, once no one is paying into or receiving social security anymore? Their reason for existence would simply go away, and all the funds that supported that edifice would have to go toward the UBI.

I'm actually quite surprised that the strongly fiscally-conservative among us have not glommed onto Friedman's original idea like cats in a toy mouse factory. In one fell swoop, half of what they rail against could be eliminated: the inefficiencies inherent in the "welfare state". I guess it's because they have so little faith in the rest of humanity, and think that the UBI would be widely "abused", generating a large permanent "leecher" class. It seems to me that we already have that "class" of humans (across the entire economic spectrum, as it were) so really, what's the worst that could happen? I'm just optimistic enough to think that maybe we'll get to find out.

Re:The description is a lie...

[pulse2600]

I'm responding to this one, but this is really meant for all the others too that responded saying its an experiment, I'm outnumbered, I'm a shitlord, etc :)

The problem is that monitoring will be inherent in the solution...when has any government ever done anything like this with no strings attached? With no intrusion into your life? Anyone who says 'its an experiment, it doesn't have to be that way in reality' is living in a fantasy world. Of course it would have to be that way, just like the purest ideas of whatever ideology you or I subscribe to can never be implemented in the ideologist's conceived way. In what existence does any of us live in where the powers that be would not want to have those kinds of strings attached? How else do you expect the distribution of wealth and future decision making can be made regarding these kinds of programs? I for one do not want to be any kind of a social experiment. Social experiments should not happen.

You know, some people like to call the idea / creation of the United States the "great social experiment". Bullshit. Stop experimenting with freedom. Freedom is not an experiment, all these so called 'social experiments' are thinly veiled attempts to figure out how you can take someone's freedom away in a way that's acceptable to them.

The UBI ignores human nature

[timholman]

The problem with a UBI is that it is (in theory) supposed to replace the multitude of payments through various government social programs with a single check or debit card given to every recipient every month, at which point the various government agencies that administer housing, food stamps, etc., can be shut down. Government bureaucracies never shutter themselves voluntarily, and it won't happen with a UBI, either.

The UBI operates under the assumption that everyone manages money in a rational manner, which is completely at odds with actual experience. Many people will take their UBI and immediately spend it on drugs, alcohol, gambling, or bling, while ignoring the monthly rent, the electric bill, buying groceries for the children, etc. Others will be cheated out of their money by criminals or even other family members. So do we let those families starve or get evicted because the heads of household are incapable of managing money for themselves or their dependents?

Of course not. Those people will need to be helped (sarcasm intended). So the various government agencies will continue to expand and spend even more money on housing, food, medical care, etc. The UBI won't even make a dent in entitlement budgets. Instead, it will become "free money" to be squandered on a thousand other things besides basic human needs.

Anyone who doesn't think it won't happen need only look at inner city schools in the U.S. In theory, every child should be getting meals at home thanks to government SNAP benefits to their parents or guardians. In practice, schools give many kids a free breakfast and lunch every school day, and even give them food bags to take home for the weekend, because Mom or Dad can't be bothered to buy food for the kids with the SNAP money. Where does the money go? No one knows or even attempts to find out. They just give the kids free food and cross their fingers.

The UBI will not change human nature. It will instead become one of the biggest entitlement boondoggles in the history of civilization.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[amiga3D]

Yes. We have problems now with welfare recipients using money for everything but it's intended purpose. I've donated coats to children that live in homes with cable tv and a donk with 30" rims sitting in the driveway. I feel sorry for the kids, they didn't choose their fucked up parents. I think any kind of basic living stipend should be in the form of food, clothing and housing. If they want money they should work for it.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[Anonymous Coward]

The way I see it, there are two rationales for UBI:

1. It's restitution for being deprived access to natural resources - the old school Physiocrat citizen's dividend. In this case, it's none of my business how poorly you spend your restitution.

2. It's a replacement for existing welfare programs. In this case, we also have to take into account how wasteful these public programs might be. Right now someone is dying because money they would have spent on health insurance was instead spent on excessive socialized defense.

So no one is claiming that the UBI will change human nature, or that it requires humans respond in a specific way.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[shawn2772]

t's a replacement for existing welfare programs. In this case, we also have to take into account how wasteful these public programs might be. Right now someone is dying because money they would have spent on health insurance was instead spent on excessive socialized defense.

Your example is of alleged waste in a non-welfare program, but waste in welfare programs is more on point. Many welfare programs spend almost as much money on paying people to administer the programs as they do on benefits. UBI eliminates nearly all of this overhead because the only requirement for getting paid is having a pulse (and, probably, being a citizen). That frees up a lot of money for benefits. Of course it also puts all of the government employees formerly needed to administer the complex programs out of work, but their jobs were just make-work anyway, they didn't actually produce anything.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[ArrogantLemming]

In theory, every child should be getting meals at home thanks to government SNAP benefits to their parents or guardians. In practice, schools give many kids a free breakfast and lunch every school day, and even give them food bags to take home for the weekend, because Mom or Dad can't be bothered to buy food for the kids with the SNAP money. Where does the money go? No one knows or even attempts to find out. They just give the kids free food and cross their fingers.

Just a reminder, the average food stamp benefit in 2014 was $125.35 per person per month [source]. Back in grad school, a decade ago, I found a way to feed myself on $35 a week. That involved cutting out most fresh fruits and vegetables. I also limited meat to the cheapest available and only used it in 3-4 dinners a week. Now assuming that inflation on food prices has tracked the average. This plan would cost a little over $42 these days. It's a little unreasonable to expect people to eat like this, especially given how unhealthy that diet was.

Of all the people that I've met that used food stamps, none of them wanted to be there and most were ashamed of it. They want to have a job that can pay them enough to feed their family. It's just that circumstances have made that difficult to impossible (mental disability, lack of jobs in the area, recovering from an injury). Thankfully for most of them, circumstances changed and they were able to get a better paying job (mostly through hard work but occasionally luck).

Now I'm not saying there aren't some lazy bums who just want a free handout to go blow on whatever makes them feel good. But they're not the majority.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[guruevi]

My SO while pregnant was eligible for a "limited" amount of food stamps every month (because her income was too high for full benefits and I make more than double the minimum wage (that's the limit before you stop being eligible)).
WE DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO SPEND IT ON. We still have cereal, peanut butter and cans of food from that period, not the cheap value stuff either, Kellogg's brand stuff (because that's the only brands you are allowed to spend it on).

We ate with a family of 2 adult + 2 kids off 1 person's "limited" food stamps with only supplements of meats/fish and "luxury" foods. We practically had most of the fresh fruit/veggies, all basic breakfast and lunch foods (breads, cereals, toppings) as well as drinks (milk and juices) the only things we really had to buy was dinners and speciality foods. I have no idea how a family with 2 sets of food stamps can spend it all or go hungry, we got with our "limited" about $4-500/month in food and an additional $200 to spend at "farmer's markets", sure that's not enough for a family of 4 but that's pretty close and it could be done if you're thrifty.

And yes, you could potentially 'pay' under-the-table with those checks, although it's highly illegal, nobody checked the identity when we paid or you could give some foods you don't regularly eat away (2 jars of peanut butter every 2 weeks is a bit over the top, luckily those keep forever).

So between that, financial assistance, unemployment, transportation and employment assistance (yes, they will pay for taxi/bus to get someone to a 'job'), medicare/medicaid and housing assistance, you will notice we already have a Universal Basic Income. Sure you have to jump through some hoops to get it all in order (holy hell, the amount of paperwork alone is worth a small forest) but if you use your head, you could definitely do it and many people already do it.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[mongothesecond]

Rules exist for a reason. How many of those administrators are employed due to past fraud attempts?

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[shawn2772]

Rules exist for a reason. How many of those administrators are employed due to past fraud attempts?

Complex rules require complex and extensive administration. The point of UBI is that everyone gets it, so the only administration required is to make sure that the recipient is actually alive. That requires far fewer people. Not none, but far fewer.

Re:The UBI ignores human nature

[PJ6]

The UBI operates under the assumption that everyone manages money in a rational manner, which is completely at odds with actual experience ...

The UBI will not change human nature. It will instead become one of the biggest entitlement boondoggles in the history of civilization.

That's a bit unlikely considering it's being tried on small scales first.

Also, the lack of ability to plan and take care of yourself could be addressed to some or even a large degree by focusing on that in primary school.

And those who fail with free money? Declare them incompetent and think up a way to deal with those "special" cases. I guarantee they're already a problem so it's nothing new.

It is all in the name

[NEDHead]

I find that when I try to discuss the consequences of a future without scarcity I frequently get the shopworn 'people don't deserve what they don't earn, and it will be bad, bad, bad'.

Yet when I ask what someone might do if they won a big lottery prize it is all about the good times. Likewise the perfect retirement is about leisure and freedom from want.

So Puritanism seems to be appropriate, for the other guy...

Re:It is all in the name

[MitchDev]

Lottery winings come from all the people that bought lottery tickets, not from taxes. You volunteer to contribute when you buy a lottery ticket. Huge difference.

Re:It is all in the name

[NEDHead]

Actually lottery sales are generally considered to be a (regressive) tax. And more to the point is that I was trying to point out that attitudes regarding slackers who don't earn what they consume (in the eyes of some) are lucky guys (in the eyes of others.

Re:It is all in the name

[MitchDev]

Totally different animals unfortunately. Taxes you have no say in, you have to pay them. The lottery is purely optional. This is a pipe dream, and not merely tobacco, but more like major narcotics...

overtime needs to have an X2 or more level and

[Joe_Dragon]

overtime needs to have an X2 at the 55 hour a week level and the salary min needs to be like at least 50-60k + even have have a forced OT at 65+ hours a week.

For places like dunkin donuts it cheaper to have an manager working 50-60+ weeks at 30-40K then it is to hire more staff.

We need to look at moving full time down to 32-35 hours a week as more automation takes over and you are the 1 guy left doing the work of 3 people pulling at least 50 hours or more each week with no room to have any time off.

Re:overtime needs to have an X2 or more level and

[BarbaraHudson]

The convention here is 1.5x until 50 hours, 2.0x for 50-65 hours, etc ... Unless a union contract specifies mandatory overtime, just leave after the regular number of hours, or insist that they pay overtime. An easier way is to accumulate an extra hour a day by working straight through lunch and taking every second Friday off. Worked for me :-)

Re:flawed methodology

[sims 2]

1. I think anything less than a 10 year study would be a waste of time.
2. Hey man got any cash? Yeah that's how that works everyone shows up on the day the check comes but you won't see them the rest of the month.
3. I glanced at tfa and I didn't see how they were picking people either.
4. Back to 1 I think it's entirely too short of a test even 10 years may not be long enough.
5. With only 300 people I think they will run into issues with the small sample size.

Hopefully this is going to be a living wage not minimum wage. You wouldn't want to quit your day job but you would be able to quit and retrain for another profession without losing your house.
Sounds like it will make for an interesting documentary though.

medicaid, medicare need to be on there own system

[Joe_Dragon]

medicaid, medicare need to be on there own system as in the us the health insurance systems are messed up at all levels and a lump sum payment will not fix it unless there are big changes to the over all system.

Re:There's a big difference between lazy.

[liquid_schwartz]

The mythical lazy person who doesn't want to do any work just doesn't exist.

Except that I've known some. It may seem odd to you, if you are hardwired or were raised with the notion of "be productive". However I can assure you that I personally know people who do exactly zero and are quite fine with it. If you are volunteering then I think you are helping the world at large, you have something to show for yourself. Automation and such will bring changes that mean that people should work less. Ideally that would mean all work less, not some work a bunch and others work none like we have now.

It has to be large enough for that to happen

[drew_kime]

Of course it would affect your habits! People would in a better position to be selective about what jobs you take, forcing employers to stop the race to the bottom.

That only works if employers know that enough of their desired employees have that option that they (the employers) lose their leverage. When Ford started paying workers twice what other manufacturers did, they were a large enough employer that other companies had to compete for the same people. Y Combinator's experiment will only be 300 people. That's not enough to change the behavior of employers who lose out on those 300 people.

Re:It has to be large enough for that to happen

[BarbaraHudson]

So you agree that if it were universal it would have the effects I speak of?

Also, with a bisic income, more people would feel secure enough to work fewer hours while getting their own start-up going.

"Greater ability to pay!"

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Increased robotics and AI means increased productivity. However, government keeps tax income proportional to productivity growth (rather than population size of actual measured needs, either of which grows more slowly, and thus gets in the way of money to spend buying votes), meaning much of it is seized already.

This situation was predicted long ago, with the assumption there would be reduced hours worked per person. George Jetson used to whine about how his 2 hour, 3 day workweeks were killing him.

But countries that experiment with reducing work hours to increase enployment (under the theory sime minimal amount of work must still get done) find the opposite happens.

So massive numbers will be happy living purely off this income, no matter how shitty the hovel. Worse, they will vote for ever bigger cuts from those who do work, leading to more quitting their jobs because fuck it.

Re:"Greater ability to pay!"

[GameboyRMH]

You misunderstand where the fruits of increased productivity went - it didn't go into government coffers, it went into Swiss bank accounts. If inequality hadn't increased since the "working 2 days a week" predictions were made, we would indeed be only working 2 days a week, and we'd be much wealthier too (since those calculations didn't account for the income stagnation almost all of us have been suffering for decades now).

TANSTAAFL

[way2slo]

If some Billionaire wants to give their money away like this, so be it. Just remember that they or someone else had to EARN it first.

Eventually, the system will run out of other people's money.

Re:TANSTAAFL

[pr0nbot]

I have some savings that earn approx 7% interest per year. You can argue the interest payments are the premium I'm paid for the risk of default, or perhaps that they represent the opportunity cost of spending the money, but it's pretty hard for me to understand how I'm "earning" them in any sense that relates to actual work. I could go into cryogenic suspension and the money would still roll in.

I'd wager that most rich people aren't really rich from earnings; they're rich from renting out their capital.

Re:TANSTAAFL

[dbc]

7%? After inflation? Where are you doing that these days, dude.

I finally realized how the UBI could & should

[spads]

Just tax all those making in excess of some determined "wealth" threshold DIRECTLY and SOLEY to pay for it. Thus, you provide a disincentive to earn beyond this level (seems healthy off the top of my head). Also, perhaps most importantly, there is some poetic-justice in making the wealthy pay for the poor, considering they are basically alike (/brothers) of doing nothing. Or, rather, to be more accurate, I should say doing no WORK, in that I don't really consider paper-shuffling investing / entrepreneurship / business administration as being actual work (though it (sometimes) MIGHT produce actual value).

Gimme about $1200/mo

[Khyber]

I'd use that to finish up my tourmaline and gold mines and turn it into more money.

No choice

[duckintheface]

Automation and AI are for real. I've heard about job replacement by automation my whole life. But now it is seriously happening and not just for menial labor. Professional services and complex tasks are being replaced as fast as the software can be written.

So it is useless to talk about UBI as if it is optional. The only alternative is some form of luddite resistance to automation. UBI is a much better solution. It can be funded by taxing the massive profits coming from the automation. So the only real obstacle is the mindset that resists the idea of not requiring work for survival. Get over it.

Re:No choice

[Falos]

Taxing the rent-seekers that would literally* drown in the coming profits will be necessary. Necessary to KEEP giving them hilarious, robogrown profits, but whatever, UBI means the rest won't starve. Probably.

With that said, there's a few supplements that should've been a citizen's dividend in the first place. The Manna guy names a few, though some are just rebranding existing taxes as citizen's due: http://marshallbrain.com/robot...

* https://xkcd.com/1260/

Re:No choice

[ShanghaiBill]

Automation and AI are for real. I've heard about job replacement by automation my whole life. But now it is seriously happening and not just for menial labor.

There is actually very little evidence for that. America is at full employment. Labor force participation is not back to where it was in 2007, but that is mostly due to an aging population, not lack of jobs. If you look around the world, countries with the most automation (Japan, Germany, America) have the lowest unemployment, while countries with the least automation (India, Africa, Latin America) have the highest. This is exactly the opposite of what your theory would predict.

Automation is nothing new. Automated looms destroyed the jobs of weavers two centuries ago. In the late 1800s, automation of agriculture destroyed the majority of the jobs. Plenty of people predicted gloom and decline. Yet the opposite happened: The economy prospered and living standards soared. Technology makes workers more productive, and makes good and services cheaper in terms of human labor. There is little evidence that "this time things are different".

Re:No choice

[Applehu Akbar]

"Automation is nothing new..."

True enough, but every previous time the alarm "Everybody will be thrown out of work!" was raised, the conventional labor model was saved by having displaced ditch diggers retrain as heavy equipment operators, effectively giving each man a thousand times the productivity as in his old jobs. There is an increasing sense that the number of 'good jobs controlling the machines' is on the decline at the same time as our interest in applying technology is waning.

Re:No choice

[duckintheface]

When you compare the industrialized world to India, Africa, South America you are ignoring an important fact. In those poor countries there is an unsustainable birth rate. There are too many people. That means unemployment and it means that human labor is cheaper than automation even for menial labor. In India, they don't use mechanical vibrators to settle and smooth poured concrete. it's cheaper to have twenty guys mix it with their feet and smooth it by hand. That's why automation has not taken hold there.

Countries like Germany and Japan have zero internal population growth so their unemployment rate is low for now. Unless those countries take the luddite path, they will move to UBI as automation takes over.

Re:No choice

[kheldan]

It'll be a disaster, first for the countries that implement it, then for the Human Race in general.

Re:No choice

[ShanghaiBill]

In those poor countries there is an unsustainable birth rate. There are too many people.

Not true. Much of South America has a birthrate below replacement level. Italy and Greece have the highest unemployment of any 1st World countries, and the lowest birthrates outside of Japan. Unemployment has little correlation with population growth.

Re: No choice

[ShanghaiBill]

Automation is advancing more rapidly and in more industries than the time period of your example.

Automation of agriculture a century and a half ago affected far more people than automation today, because back then almost everyone was a farmer. Today, automation is having a much smaller impact, so it should be easier to adjust.

Re: No choice

[theophilosophilus]

Socialism rests on the idea that the economic pie is static and can't grow and thus one group can acquire all the stuff . Ludites similarly believe there are a ridiculously small number of ideas for prodects or services and one group (machines) can take all the jobs. The agricultural revolution is a great example of the falicy of both ideas. Automation both grew the pie by making food cheaper and grew the number of types of jobs from nearly one to what we have today.

Re:No choice

[phantomfive]

A post of reason in a sea of confusion

Re:No choice

[Chrontius]

I, for one, am grossly underemployed. NPR reported that african-american youth unemployment was over 50%. Full employment looks like that?

And second, while it makes workers more productive, who are the workers? These days, it's those who can write code. The computer-illiterate, smartphone-holdout, and people who don't get internet access at home are by definition not "workers" in the knowledge economy. Sure, they might perform essential tasks, but until self-improving AI is a thing, it's hard to call any industry a growth industry. Machine learning and computer vision are going to make more and more easily automatable.

What's different this time is that automation is hitting huge swaths of the market simultaneously. Sure, while technology makes workers more productive, and goods and services cheaper in terms of human labor, it also does displace human labor. Given that it can take ten years to train for a job that gets replaced in a year of coding, we come to the limiting factor: Shit changes faster than we can be trained to deal with it. If you have labor to exchange, you're golden. If you don't, where are you going to find a few millibitcoins to exchange for the right to sleep in a 3d-printed hotel room for a night?

Can you find something you can do that's worth paying you minimum wage? If not, can you live sustainably on less than minimum wage? (Emphasis on sustainably - your diet can't cause diabetus, malnutrition, micronutrient starvation, or obesity, for example, and your dwelling has to be secure enough that what you can't carry on your person at all times will be there when you need it.)

Re:No choice

[shutdown -p now]

Automation is nothing new, indeed. As you point out yourself, it wiped out jobs before. What was different is that there were other jobs to be filled, and usually in roughly the same niche (i.e. a blue collar worker would still be a blue collar worker).

What's different now is that we're running out of places to shift people who are doing those jobs that will be made redundant by further automation.

Comparing Germany to India doesn't really make much sense, because it's apples to oranges - the two countries have vastly different quality of life levels. In other words, the workers in Germany produce more abstract wealth per capita than the workers in India. Comparing employment rates thus doesn't make much sense, because the amount produced is different.

Oh, and there's another thing that's "different" (but actually similar to what we've seen before). While productivity is skyrocketing, the extra wealth produced by that increased productivity is not actually distributed to those people who implement it, by and large. Last time this was happening was late 19th century, and the result was a series of socialist and communist uprisings around the world, and evolution into some sort of welfare state (New Deal etc) in countries that were not affected by those revolutions, but didn't want to be next in line. It can be argued that we're on the verge of a similar thing right now, and UBI is a logical remedy.

Re: No choice

[shutdown -p now]

Socialism rests on the idea that the economic pie is static and can't grow and thus one group can acquire all the stuff

It doesn't, actually. It rests on the idea that produced wealth is finite, and thus one group can appropriate it all. That the first part is true is trivially demonstrable. That the second part is true is obvious when you look at real income vs productivity growth over the past few decades.

Re:No choice

[jwhitener]

The rate of change is what is much higher/faster now. The prediction is that new types of jobs won't be invented fast enough to keep up with the losses from automation.

Starfleet, here I come!

[jsepeta]

Where do I enlist? I want to participate in the FUTURE economy, not in the shitty "new economy".

Absolutely agree

[drew_kime]

My point is that this private experiment is too small to cause the changes to the employers. The individuals in the experiment will change their behavior, but if the employers don't have to care there's a chance everything goes back to "normal" when the experiment ends. Then opponents get to say, "See, I told you it wouldn't work."

Re:Absolutely agree

[BarbaraHudson]

All it takes is for one or more employees to change their behavior by switching employers or doing their own start-up to prove it works. And among a group of 300, it's almost a certainty to happen.

Money doesn't grow on trees

[kheldan]

Oh, there ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay
I got mouths to feed
And ain't nothing in this world for free
No I can't slow down
I can't hold back
Though you know I wish I could
No there ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good

Also,

Magic always comes with a price, dearies

Sure, this sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Who wouldn't like to just quit their job and live their life however they can afford on money they get 'for free' from the government, or at least have extra all the time that they know they don't have to work for? But come on, people, you know it's never going to be that easy. The money has to come from somewhere, and that 'somewhere' is taxpayers. The Affordable Care Act (aka 'Obamacare') sounded wonderful to me, too -- for the first 30 seconds or so, until I came full-stop internally and thought "..hey, who's paying for all this?". Turns out it's ***ME*** who's paying for it, in having health insurance shoved down my throat, whether I wanted/needed it or not, or be increasingly penalized every year on my Federal taxes for not buying it. All so many lazy people who didn't take care of themselves can get expensive healthcare. So it would go with this 'Universal Basic Income': layabouts will welcome it, and the working people will pay increasingly higher taxes to pay for lazy-asses to sit on their butts and play all day. Then, of course, 'Magic always comes with a price': The rich will, naturally, find some way out of paying their fair share for this magical boon, and so will corporations, placing the entire burden of it squarely on the shoulders of the working class, who, ironically enough, would be the people most likely to benefit from it. Next you'll say 'the government will pay for it by cancelling X, Y, and Z social welfare programs', but come on, you know that's never going to happen! There is enough of a socialist movement in this country that they'll find enough plausible reasons why X, Y, and Z social programs need to be continued. So they'll just tax people more. And the rich and corporations will continue to say nope, nope, nope! to the taxation, and leave the working class holding the bag, again. Finally, some of you are saying, 'oh, but people naturally want to work, it's in our DNA, so most people will continue to work anyway'. That's also a bunch of nonsense; people are naturally lazy (except for some, of course), and given the opportunity they'll be lazy and unproductive, so long as they have a roof over their heads, enough to eat, and sex. Furthermore, over the last few decades I see people getting lazier and lazier, less willing to learn to do things (or learn at all), and the bar overall being lowered rather than raised, as we have more and more technology to do things for us, remember things for us, and generally move humans towards obsolescence. Even TFA talks about 'unemployment due to AI and robotics taking people's jobs' being the reason we need this UBI in the first place. We already have a segment of the population that doesn't have any work ethic whatsoever, because they come from (literally!) generations that lived their entire lives on the welfare dole; having a job is a completely foreign concept to them. This 'Univeral Basic Income' will create entire populations of people who don't work, will never work, and who will look at you like you're speaking a foreign language when you tell them their lives could actually be better if they had a job and earned money. They'll have no incentive of any kind to improve their lives, seek higher learning, learn skills, or anything else, because they're fed, clothed, and housed by the State. If Universal Basic Income becomes a real threat here in the United States, and it comes down to a public vote, I would vote a resounding NO! on it, and urge everyone around me to do the same. It's a bad idea not only for countries, but for the Human Race in general.

Re:Money doesn't grow on trees

[Ice Tiger]

So are the AI and robots going to spend money to keep our economy going?

Re:Money doesn't grow on trees

[kheldan]

Oh don't be rediculous. How can anyone think that just giving people free money is going to solve anything in the long run? How about this: How about we educate people and train them for new jobs in this changing world, instead of encouraging them to sit around and do nothing? Or are we really reaching the point where human lives are so cheap that nobody cares if they're wasted? We Humans are supposedly at the very top of the food chain, allegedly these magnificently evolved creatures with self-aware, creative, thinking, tool-building-and-using brains, yet we're going to just let entire populations sit idle? Go watch a movie called Idiocracy and see if you still think this 'UBI' is such a great idea.

We already know what will happen

[koan]

It's called communism, but aside from ideology, it will just reiterate what we already know about human behavior.

Some will always find a way to be productive, and some are happy to idle away their lives.

Not a good experiment due to small sample size

[naris]

Unfortunately, I do not see usable results coming from this as 300 is too small a sample size for this type of experiment. You can pretty much guarantee success or failure depending on who you pick to participate. Also, where the participants are from will greatly affect the outcome. If the participants are geographically spread out will most likely result in vastly different results than if they are all in the same, very small, town. The best "experiment" would involve an entire town, city, province/state or even country. Unfortunately, to perform such a larger experiment would require a vast sum of money that would be difficult to arrange at best.

This is happening already

[Tony Isaac]

Many young people, and some not so young, are living in their parents' basements, essentially getting an income for free. No rent, no grocery bill, no utility bills, no-cost Internet. All that is worth at least $1,000-2,000 per month.

What do these people do? Well, duh! If they don't have to work, most of them don't! Why would anyone work, when they can play video games all day, or read facebook posts, or sleep around, or whatever else they want to do?

Work is a basic human need, benefiting us in far more ways than just earning us money. It gives us a sense of belonging, of purpose, confidence, happiness, and self-esteem. But it's like eating vegetables. We all know we should, but our expanding waistlines make it clear that it's not enough motivation just to know that we should. Tying work to money is one of the greatest things we can do for our children, and our society.

Liquor & drug industry would profit massively

[mileshigh]

Most people need externally-imposed structure, even though they hate it. Otherwise, it's too easy to put things off until "later." Case in point: statistics inform me, dear reader, that you're probably 10+ pounds over your ideal weight. As a /. reader, you probably consider yourself to be above-average motivated, etc, but I'll bet you're (still) planning to get rid of the weight, and how's that working out? Now, if you suddenly couldn't get any kind of sex whenever you're 3+ lbs. over your ideal weight, how long would it take you to get and stay skinny?

For many people, financial need is what gives them that sense of urgency. Some may view having a "crappy" job like working as a waiter as human bondage that should be automated, but they're ignoring the fact that said job is what gets that person up in the morning and gives their life structure. Otherwise, it's just too easy to smoke a joint and think about what you'd like to do today... but probably won't get around to doing.

I grew up with a lot of kids with rich-kid allowances. Not huge amounts of money, but typically in that annual $30 - 60K range that's being proposed for a UBI. In about half the cases they've wasted their potential. In other words, they're middle-aged fuck-ups still sucking on the parental teat, and their well-meaning parents can't bring themselves to cut them off.

And guess what? They mostly spend their days pleasantly high or buzzed. Based on this (not conjecture), my experience is that giving many people an allowance gives them one less reason to stay off drink and drugs.

Re: medicaid, medicare need to be on there own sys

[jedidiah]

There's no reason to buy into the mindless propaganda and beat up on the US system in particular. Medical care costs a lot of money. It's expensive even if you do stiff the people doing the work or the R&D. That doesn't change even if you alter the venue.

UBI isn't going to be enough to pay for hip surgery in Spain.

People that aren't saving up for a rainy day now, won't suddenly do so when their money is given to them rather than being forced to work for it.

re: Racing to the Bottom

[salgak2016]

Given a private sector, the more likely outcome is that salaries would drop additionally by the amount of the UBI. Why do I say this ? I work in DC Metro. We HAVE people who get paid a fixed amount monthly, Military Retirees. While considered valuable employees with needed experience and skills, they routinely get lower offers simply BECAUSE the employers know they already have an outside income stream. . . .

Need a true cross section of society

[Beeftopia]

If this is a highly vetted population, it won't take into account the grifters, criminals, mentally incompetent and others which make up the tapestry of society. It's like testing a chemical reaction but not adding all the chemicals.

The nice thing about social science studies (and studies in general) is you can make them say just about anything to advance your cause. Just massage the incoming data, in any number of ways, and it will say what you want it to say. "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

Re:Need a true cross section of society

[naris]

That, or it could consist of solely "the grifters, criminals, mentally incompetent and others which make up the tapestry of society" and guarantee failure...

Re:Need a true cross section of society

[dbc]

There is a fine line between being a grifter and being a VC... so I can see where YC might have found this idea attractive in some sort of mentally incompetent way.

there needs to be some kind of very low minwage

[Joe_Dragon]

there needs to be some kind of very low min wage to stop the work place from making you pay for uniforms, dine and dash, your tools, and so on.

Re:there needs to be some kind of very low minwage

[bondsbw]

Why would you work somewhere that pays you $1/hour and then charges you near that much just to work? Remember, the point of UBI is so you aren't so desperate for money that you need a job no matter the conditions.

Tell that employer, "Pay me more, pay for the uniforms and tools yourself, or screw you." Go work for someone who will pay you what you feel it's worth.

Re:there needs to be some kind of very low minwage

[Joe_Dragon]

but what about that comes after you first 1-2 weeks? or they you better pay out of your tips.

Re:there needs to be some kind of very low minwage

[bondsbw]

Ok, think about this situation today: You get hired and then a month later your boss says, "You owe me rent for the space you were provided to work, from the day you were hired. Make that $30,000 check out to me." If they didn't disclose that fee up front, of course that wouldn't be legal. (And depending on state laws it may be unenforceable even if it were disclosed up front.)

Sure, in some states they could probably say "pay up or else you're fired". Then quit, if what you get isn't worth it to you. Again the UBI serves as a backup that keeps you and your kids from starving.

Re:there needs to be some kind of very low minwage

[Joe_Dragon]

but the state laws it may be unenforceable even if it were disclosed are under the min wage ones.

Re:there needs to be some kind of very low minwage

[bondsbw]

They would fall under the same commerce laws as any undisclosed charges.

Re:I finally realized how the UBI could & shou

[GameboyRMH]

This would indeed work, disregarding any problems of political infeasibility. If income were capped to something, say, in the mid-6-digits-per-year range, the money would have to be spent on something. The ability to hoard wealth is the biggest economy-killer.

Looking for Bob Newhart

[dbc]

So this makes me think of a story about the comedian Bob Newhart. Hopefully I don't mangle the details too badly.

Before he started making money from comedy, he had a day job, working for (I think it was) Maryland's state run unemployment assistance department as a clerk. The public assistance in those days was US$80 per week (we've had a bit of inflation since then). He was processing these people's applications to get $80 a week for being unemployed -- while being paid (IIRC) $82.50 per week. So he quit and went on unemployment so that he could work on his routine full time.

Clearly, YC is looking for the Bob Newharts of the world. They might be fewer and farther between than YC imagines, methinks.

If you need a distraction today: For some of his earlier work, look up the comedy album "Something Like This" and listen to the routine: "Introducing Tobacco to Civilization" -- which consists of one side of telephone conversation between Sir Walter Raliegh and the office back home in London.

Re: Racing to the Bottom

[BarbaraHudson]

Too bad you don't have laws preventing discrimination based on social or economic status. This would also help women in obtaining the same pay for the same work, instead of the "the guy needs more because he's the head of the family" crap, and help prevent the economic abuse of interns (or perm-interns).

How much is enough

[zerosomething]

Two questions.
1. What percent of your current income are you OK with government taking to fund all government services as well as the basic income?
2. How much is a basic income? It's a lot cheeper to live in Gotebo Oklahoma than New York City and what prevents me from saying I live in NYC and collecting that level of BI and then just live in Gotebo?

Do you understand how UBI/SNAP work?

[mx b]

Many people will take their UBI and immediately spend it on drugs, alcohol, gambling, or bling, while ignoring the monthly rent, the electric bill, buying groceries for the children, etc.

[CITATION NEEDED]

Do you have evidence this is true for welfare and other checks, or is it just how you feel? I suspect you've never been in the heartbreaking situation (which I'm glad you haven't experienced it!) of having so little income that you have to decide between food and the electric bill. I'm sure there are some outliers that can't be helped and will spend on drugs but you need to understand this is a small minority compared to all poor people.

So the various government agencies will continue to expand and spend even more money on housing, food, medical care, etc. The UBI won't even make a dent in entitlement budgets. Instead, it will become "free money" to be squandered on a thousand other things besides basic human needs.

Again, citation? Has anyone's plan specifically said "We will grow government larger and larger"? Most of the proposals I've seen have been the opposite; if you make a fair tax system (stop giving tax handouts to the rich) and implement UBI instead of the hodgepodge of programs we have no (SS, medicare, medicaid, etc.), we'd save billions by eliminating duplicate administrative costs.

Now my concern is that many people are employed by the federal government, so the real cost will be all the people worried about losing their jobs and becoming poor. But if there's UBI, they won't lose their home if laid off. And, its possible we could pivot many of these jobs to other agencies -- for example, more workers in the justice dept to reduce the time we wait for hearings/court cases, or to the VA to get caught up on paperwork and get veterans help, or even dept of the interior and let them clean up state and national parks or become EPA inspectors to actually enforce our laws. Random ideas here, but the point is that government will likely be reduced, and worst case, be about the save size but massive amounts of people repurposed to things that need to get done but aren't under the current bureaucracy.

Anyone who doesn't think it won't happen need only look at inner city schools in the U.S. In theory, every child should be getting meals at home thanks to government SNAP benefits to their parents or guardians. In practice, schools give many kids a free breakfast and lunch every school day, and even give them food bags to take home for the weekend, because Mom or Dad can't be bothered to buy food for the kids with the SNAP money. Where does the money go? No one knows or even attempts to find out. They just give the kids free food and cross their fingers.

What do you mean "Where does that money go?". I don't even know where you got this from.

As someone that was personally on SNAP in the past (long story, but basically as a new college instructor, you actually make so little money that I qualified for SNAP for a while. True story.), I can tell you that it is not a check in the mail of free money. You get a debit card that is pre-loaded with a small amount of money (a maximum of $200 per month for an individual; I challenge you to keep your food budget under $200 per month = about $7 a day. You do get more money for each dependent you have, but it's a small increase.). This card can ONLY be used by stores that accept SNAP, and it is restricted to ONLY purchase food items. For example, you cannot swipe your SNAP card to purchase lottery tickets or alcohol. You're not even allowed to buy "prepared food" (meaning like food you'd get from a restaurant; so you have to buy frozen foods or canned foods only, and cook at home).

Anyone on SNAP that can't feed their kids is probably running up against that roughly $7 per day limit. Even if you double it to $15/day for a family, can you spend $15 per day consistently? A pound of chicken is pushing $10. Milk is a f

Reproductive control

[Camel Pilot]

I would suspect that if an UBI was implemented mandatory state enforced birth control would soon follow. While you may pursuing volunteering and music some might take all that extra time to create more mouths to feed to house, etc. If we get to the point that humans and labor are not essential then population control would quickly find itself on the agenda.

Re: Racing to the Bottom

[salgak2016]

Actually, if you look at the data, for the same job and level, women tend to get paid slightly MORE, given the same hours logged, The so-called Wage Gap is due to career choice, not a lot of women gravitate to the sort of jobs that have high pay, but also high physical danger. And, at least at the macro level, women work fewer hours. After all, if I have two people of identical capabilities and talent, and one works more hours for the same cash, who do you THINK a manager will retain and promote ? However, that is a tangent from the argument, that existing income streams independent of an employer can have a decided effect on offered compensation. . .

Why criticize? Be excited for experimentation!

[RobinH]

The right thing to do here is to cheer on this research. Everyone now just has this idea: it's a nice thought but it won't work. However, the only major experiment done so far (in Manitoba in the 70's) indicated the net result seems to be positive. Now with Finland planning a big experiment and 4 Dutch cities trying it, and now Y Combinator, we might finally get some data to see how people really react. No matter whether you think this will work or not, at least there are experiments on the go to actually try it. That's excellent.

The Problem: Prices will raise

[BlueCoder]

The higher the basic income the higher the price increase on items. Primarily something like rent. Look at the market in Los Angeles. It's more or less at full occupancy so when all those people start receiving their basic income check their rent will go up 80% of the check.

Just look at what student loans have done. Colleges just raise their rates in proportion to the student loans. Increasing the student loans only increases what colleges charge.

Sure in small sample sizes you can analyze behavior of the subjects but you really need to look at entire communities otherwise you won't see price increases and what you need set the basic income to... which may make the discussion entirely moot.

Re:The Problem: Prices will raise

[moeinvt]

You're totally right about the student loans, but an income subsidy, IF funded by tax revenue, doesn't create extra demand. With student loans, you create a future liability, so you've "pulled forward" future expenditures and created extra demand in the present.
If the UBI replaced government spending under current programs or was taxed out of the economy, there's no increase in total demand. There would definitely be price effects in particular markets(like rent), but it would still be the same amount of $$$ chasing the same amount of goods, so how could there be any across-the-board price increases?

UBI Missing the point.

[tonywestonuk]

The economy is fucked. Stock markets are falling, and it looks like there will be another crash.....soon. This is because people DO NOT HAVE THE MONEY, and FAR TOO MUCH DEBT to buy stuff..... They don't have enough money (on average), because automation as already started to take effect.... With technology, 1 person can now do the work the work of 3....however that employee will still only only get the wages of 1, and the other 2 parts goes to the boss. Hence the rich are getting richer..... and the poor / middle class are simply not getting enough cash to drive the economy. And so the stock market crashes. UBI is needed to balance this out....to allow the wheels of capitalism to work....without seizing up due to the automation. So as a capitalist, Bring a set amount of UBI now, in order to stop the financial pain everyone is feeling at the moment./

Might be cheaper

[moeinvt]

I tend to disagree with the UBI concept on the surface, but who knows? It might even turn out to be cheaper in the long run. Consider the gargantuan amounts of tax revenue currently being spent on every social program at every level of government in the USA. Medicare and Medicaid, SS, food stamps, housing subsidies, etc. Imagine if it was all consolidated in a single program which used direct transfer payments to supplement incomes. Here's the $$$, buy your own food, housing and healthcare. The program would obviously require some administrative overhead, but it seems like it could eliminate a giga-ton of bureaucracy, regulation and redundancy.

How is this sustainable?

[zapadnik]

While we'd all like to be paid to do whatever we felt like, how is this in any way sustainable? the money that is put into this project is very unlikely to be recovered, and certainly not if replicated over the general population.

What do you think about the significance of what this kind of small-population study would show?

Nothing, because this has been tried in dozens of countries in the 20th Century alone. It didn't work in any of them because it CANNOT work. This doesn't understand that economies are not a zero sum game - it doesn't understand a Fundamental Principle of economics, "WEALTH IS CREATED". Wealth is created through innovation and perspiration and the promise of a reward for your labor. If there is no reward for your labor then there is no incentive to create wealth.

Just think of how Steve Jobs created massive wealth for himself and others, and gave jobs to hundreds of thousands across the globe, all though the power of his vision and hard work in ***creating wealth***.

The Collectivist wealth redistribution folks are worried about the fairness of making sure everyone gets an equal cut of the pie. The Free Market solution is, "bake more pies"!

With this scheme, there is no incentive for the *general population* to get out of bed to produce. It is unsustainable, and since it is unsustainable the people who control such a system (Collectivist politicians and apparatchiks) always end up resorting to increasing oppression to try and preserve the unsustainable system a little longer. You can even see this happening in Europe where the Ponzi scheme welfare states are unsustainable with non-pyramid demographics. So the 'elites' are replacing the native populations with fast-breading people from the Third World to try keep the Ponzi scheme going - and use the media to demonize all dissent to this population replacement. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of the imported people agree with this Y Combinator scheme and want to be paid without having to produce anything in return. The system is unsustainable and only increasing repression (which is starting to happen if you watch the police forces in Europe work for the elites against legitimate peaceful protests) can delay the inevitable collapse of this system.

I used to think the Y Combinator folks were pretty smart. My opinion of them has dropped massively for doing an experiment that has been tried on the huge scale (eg. in China, North Korea, all the countries of the Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics, East Germany, Venezuela today, etc) in the past and ALWAYS fails.

This is a nice idea (I'd love to get paid to do whatever coding I wanted) but it economically unsustainable - and when applied to countries ALWAYS ends up in oppression of those who point out the fact such a system is ultimately unsustainable (even in Sweden they seem to ruthlessly crush dissenting voices to their redistributionist system through severe public vilification).

Re:How is this sustainable?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Apple employs 115,000 people.

It has cash reserves of $200B dollars.

Yes, that's right. For every person it employs, it has $1.7M stashed away. Do you think Steve Jobs personally designed the iPhone, toiled away in the factory making all those iPads, created all that wealth by himself?

Or do you think those 115,000 people helped in some way? Or why else where they employed?

Do you think all the government research that went into the technology in an iPhone helped? Do you think a government funded education helped to create all those engineers and programmers that made it so successful? Do you think that a society which provided a solid base for it's citizens to build on helped create customers for all those iPads?

Why do you think that Apple is a company who's workers created $1.7M of profit - that's surplus, not even including the net value - each, but all that money ended up in a pile in the middle? Do you think that's helpful, or productive?

For perspective, the most expensive civil research project on Earth, the ITER reactor, has cost around $15B. That's trying to solve the energy crisis. Apple sits on that $200B, presumably so they can do a stock repurchase to keep their price up if people think the next iPhone sucks or something.

There's a difference between money, and wealth.

> The Free Market solution is, "bake more pies"!

The free market solution is increasingly "Hey, I've got this great pie machine that can bake more pies, I can fire all my human bakers and maybe shave 5% off the price of my pies to capture the market until my competition is dead." Sooner or later, no-one's going to be able to afford a pie because they all got fired. And the pie makers all scrabble to eliminate the last vestiges of human labour from their bakeries to cut their costs, not realizing that the reason sales are down this quarter is because they fired everyone and now no-one can afford pies.

Sooner or later, someone will realize that if they don't start handing out pies, the bakery door is going to be kicked in by the angry mob declaring the citizens pie revolution.

Re:How is this sustainable?

[zapadnik]

Hi, it's nice to meet another PhD here.

Or do you think those 115,000 people helped in some way? Or why else where they employed?

These people were compensated for their labor. But what makes Steve Jobs special is that he had the great idea. Without him the iPhone would not exist and EVERYONE would be worse off. Furthermore, the ecosystem that benefitted from Steve Jobs' brilliance is vastly greater than the 115k Apple employees.

The World needs more entrepreneurs, not less. That is why you life is so very much better today than the life of the greatest royalty a century ago. Governments did NOT do this, visionaries and hard working people did. They are the ones who CREATE wealth - and they keep a fraction of the wealth they generate and then the rest is distributed to the lesser people who helped, but did not have the creative idea themselves.

Do you not understand that entrepreneurs and risk takers and business creators create all the wealth you see around you (everything you choose to eat or wear or play with) ?

Do you think all the government research that went into the technology in an iPhone helped? Do you think a government funded education helped to create all those engineers and programmers that made it so successful? Do you think that a society which provided a solid base for it's citizens to build on helped create customers for all those iPads?

Ok, so you are a worshipper of the Government, Got that. If Government is so great then why don't the North Koreans and Chinese and Soviets outstrip the entrepreneurs of the West in creativity and producing choice for consumers? because private property matters - entrepreneurs create based on their self-interest which does far, far more to help society than the self-interest of bureaucrats does. Big Govenrment doesn't create wealth nor liberty nor innovation - individual entrepreneurs do that and employ people who may be skilled but lack the vision and drive to create new markets and products that benefit EVERYONE.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs obtain their money through voluntary exchange which is perceived as win-win by both sides. Governments don't - their transactions are involuntary (and thus. immoral), are win-lose, and only occur through coercion (the threat of Government initiating force to take what it demands). These systems are not equivalent at all.

With regard to Government research, just because the robber occasionally does some nice things for his neighborhood does not make the robber or the robbery any less immoral. You can have all the socialism/communism/croynism/Academic-Bureaucratic Complex you want, just stop demanding everyone else pay for it.

Why do you think that Apple is a company who's workers created $1.7M of profit - that's surplus, not even including the net value - each, but all that money ended up in a pile in the middle? Do you think that's helpful, or productive?

Do you not understand any economics at all? profit is required so that investment can be made for further products and wealth generation. This is analogous to thermodynamics where energy differentials are required for any work to be possible. The Marxist idea of wealth redistribution is not only immoral (since the initiation of force is required against Individual by the Collective) but also removes concentrations of capital that are required to produce society-benefiting products. Of course, in a Collectivist system the wealth is not actually redistributed evenly at all, the peasants are given minimum rations and the State hordes the capital (which the most politically ruthless can use for their own benefit).

For perspective, the most expensive civil research project on Earth, the ITER reactor, has cost around $15B. That's trying to solve the energy crisis. Apple sits on that $200B, presumably so they can do a stock repurchase to keep their price up if people

Re: Racing to the Bottom

[BarbaraHudson]

And yet women without children are still discriminated against even using your theories.

Re:Small-scale != UBI?

[moeinvt]

I disagree with UBI, but, assuming it wasn't funded by $trillions in new government borrowing, I don't think it would cause price inflation. Price inflation occurs when there are more units of currency chasing the same amount of goods. With UBI, there would be no "extra" money in the economy, because the money to fund such a program would first need to be taken from somewhere else. i.e. it would have to be funded by cutting government spending in some other area, or, by taking money out of the private economy via taxation.

Universal Basic Work

[edis]

This thingie must be turned backwards: is it really so, that absolutely no useful work can be offered in exchange to UBI?

What I think.

[hackus]

I think if so much of the worlds capital was not held by tiny little minds, and the other 98% were given that capital to actually do something constructive with it, I think we wouldn't need a basic income for everyone.

Everyone would have the opportunity to decide for themselves.

the vcs may need it

[doom]

> What do you think about the significance of what this kind of > small-population study would show? What it's going to show is that the VC firms have been fooling themselves about their own accumen in picking winning ideas, and if they had just handed out money at random their hit rate would've been roughly the same. We can only hope a universal basic income comes along in time to take care of them all when they're all out of a job.

Re:There's a big difference between lazy.

[Your.Master]

I'll preface this by saying I think that the lazy person who is also starving / homeless because they are so lazy, *is* a myth. The hardest working people in society are at the bottom rungs. That doesn't mean that the CEO of the multimillion dollar corporation doesn't work his ass off. But the janitor working 2 full time jobs and one part time job to make rent is also working his ass off.

And it doesn't have to be paid work either. [examples]

That's where it falls over. You (maybe not you personally, but you generically) can find the same fulfillment in reading, playing video games, solving logic puzzles, considering philosophy, socialising with peers, playing sports, commenting on Internet forums, etc.. You could call that "work" in a sense, but it's the sort of work that nobody would give a shit about if you stopped doing (except the writers you pay to write books, developers you pay to develop games, people who read your brilliantly insightful comments on Slashdot, etc.). I can tell you the sense of accomplishment from completing all the toughest SpaceChem challenges is as much or more than any accomplishment I've ever had in my career, and I'd rather get the SpaceChem style accomplishments because I had fun doing it. This is at least as mentally active as a monk's chores.

The lazy person who doesn't want to do any work *that anybody else needs* absolutely exists. I have no data on how common they are relative to the people who have a deep-seated need to be valued by others, but it's common enough. That's what's at issue here.

Fortunately, there is an answer. A universal basic income doesn't have to be so luxurious that lazy people don't want more, and will trade their labour to get more. And if you can afford it to be so luxurious that they don't work? Then so what, they don't work. Clearly you didn't need them to generate this luxury lifestyle for everyone.

I really, honestly don't know how a UBI will work out in practice. It's barely been experimented on. I hope it works. The principles behind it are not unsound. But practical economics is often way more complicated than our simple pure theories predict.

Experiment has already been done

[wakeboarder]

I worked with an indigenous group in Canada, where each person receives approximately 1500$ CAD every other week. They didn't have to do anything to receive that money. There was some interesting things that went on at their reservation. Most of the houses I visited were halfway destroyed. I watched them build new houses and within a week or two they would be missing windows and the doors would be torn off the cupboards. I heard stories of kids that would get a brand new xbox and it would be rendered nonfunctional. If there was a new window anywhere, and I mean anywhere on the reservation, a rock would be thrown through it with in two weeks. They had a school, the school was surrounded by a fence so people couldn't break in and vandalize it. Vehicles, same thing.

I'm not going to judge, but I can't help but think that there has to be a link between the money they received and the value they placed on everything. Most people there place little value on material things that they bought (or were given to them, it was my understanding that their organization bought them their houses), I observed that first hand. Was it because of their culture? Was it because they got money? I don't know, but I know that the money didn't help them out any. If you were given a brand new top of the line alienware laptop (or mac book if you like turtlenecks), what would you do with it? Probably keep it and use it or sell it. If you knew you were going to be given the same laptop every hour, and I told you to smash one of them you would be receiving, would you do it? The answer would probably still be 'No', but it would be much easier to persuade you to do so. Its all about value, if you have to trade your resources to get something (like your time) it becomes much more valuable.

Re:Experiment has already been done

[djinn6]

Do they spend the money they're given to buy these Xbox's or does someone simply give it to them? Do they even know what to do with one?

The broken windows seems to be a law enforcement issue. If they don't bother investing time into policing their own community, then that's a cultural issue that would not apply to other western communities.

If my town had the same sort of vandalism problems and the police couldn't control it, I would vote to replace the police chief, possibly hiring a better one from elsewhere. And if that didn't fix the problem, I might volunteer my own time or join a vigilante group. But I think that's because I value my windows (or rather, security in my possessions) a lot more than these indigenous people, and I think that's true for most people.

You want to load MORE people onto my back?

[K. S. Van Horn]

I don't have a comment on the study, but I know what "Universal basic income" means to me -- I get to work harder for a smaller take-home paycheck while even more able-bodied adults than before are supported by my labor. (I have an ex-wife and several adult children who don't work.)

In the post-robot/AI society ...

[cyberspittle]

Universal basic income will become more and more a reality, as humans are displaced from work. Robots will replace humans for most physical work, while AI will replace management. Management tends to rely more on more on the use of metrics and less so on human interaction. Humans will be needed in the in-between areas.

Re:Liquor & drug industry would profit massive

[Chrontius]

Case in point: statistics inform me, dear reader, that you're probably 10+ pounds over your ideal weight. As a /. reader, you probably consider yourself to be above-average motivated, etc, but I'll bet you're (still) planning to get rid of the weight, and how's that working out? Now, if you suddenly couldn't get any kind of sex whenever you're 3+ lbs. over your ideal weight, how long would it take you to get and stay skinny?

As someone who cut classes to take his sister to doctors' appointments, who is still looking for technical jobs at 5:10 in the morning, please do me a favor and get fucked. Sure, I could lose some around the middle, but all the motivation in the world won't get me a gym membership, and if I run until I drop, I still won't lose any weight - it takes anaerobic exercise to build muscle and increase your BMR. If I couldn't get laid until I was within sneezing distance of my ideal weight, nothing would change.

Maybe I'm just bitter and angry and spent ten years studying shit for no reason, but I spent ten years learning to do the stuff that was going to be in demand until the 2008 recession scuttled the expansion plans of all the biotechs I was aiming to play against each other, and if you spend four years in college, nobody calls you back for the "Would you like fries with that?" industry, because they know (rightly) that you'll bail at the first opportunity, so frankly, I'd be pleased as fucking punch if I could get someone to pay me while I found someone who needs a rare and specialized skillset to do Real Interesting Fucking Things to push the world onto a path with less human suffering.

Yeah - bitter, angry, and I'd like to look forward to getting out of bed, rather than checking for calls back I never get.

Re:Liquor & drug industry would profit massive

[legRoom]

I believe you're right that UBI cannot end well, but I do wonder what the alternatives are if automation really takes off.

I suppose that everyone could eventually be employed in the entertainment (in the broadest possible sense of the word) industry in some fashion, but I'm sure that such a total focus on emotional and intellectual hedonism wouldn't turn out all that much better than the physical hedonism you're concerned about.

Based on this (not conjecture), my experience is that giving many people an allowance gives them one less reason to stay off drink and drugs.

I'm pretty sure that if you did a poll, you would find that support for UBI is strongly correlated with support for the blanket legalization of mind-altering drugs, and vice-versa.

Re:No it's not interesting. It's idiotic.

[Ice Tiger]

But why pay lots of people to do jobs when automation can do it much cheaper, unless you have UBI to redistribute wealth because it's not everyone in a room having the same salary but most of the having 1$ whilst a few have greater than $1000. UBI isn't about printing more money which would lead to the scenario you describe but to tax capital to redistribute it.

universal declaration of human rights

[cluemore]

i think this is apropos

UN Declaration of Human Rights

have a look at articles 24, 25 and 26 ...

article 24 - reasonable limitations on hours of work required. paid vacation is mandatory.
article 25 - guaranteed minimum income
article 26 - accessible education for all

Looking over that, I'd say that this basic minimum wage guaranteed is simply a means to comply with the United Nations declaration of universal human rights.

=begin gadfly
As far as I know, this declaration is for humans only, not robots, not corporate "humans" (that frankenstein creation of SCOTUS), not military contractors with their guaranteed cost plus corporate welfare that dwarfs the cost of this plan.
=end gadfly

See Charles Murray's Argument

[Baldrson]

Charles Murray's book "In Our Hands" argues that universality is key to the pragmatics of the unconditional basic income for one main reason:

Everyone knows everyone else in the community is getting it.

This changes the community dynamics by placing social responsibility on everyone in the community -- placing the delivery of social goods "in our hands" rather than the government's.

Re: medicaid, medicare need to be on there own sys

[RespekMyAthorati]

There's no reason to buy into the mindless propaganda and beat up on the US system in particular.

How about the reason that the U.S. pays more per patient than any other industrialized nation, but gets at best middling results?