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VC, Entrepreneur Says Basic Income Would Work Even If 90% People 'Smoked Pot' and Didn't Work (techinsider.io)
An anonymous reader cites a story on TI: The chief complaint people lodge at universal basic income -- a form of income distribution that gives people money to cover basic needs regardless of whether they work or not -- is that it'll make them lazy. Sam Altman doesn't buy it. In a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, entitled "Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?" Altman argued basic income could support huge amounts of productivity loss and still carry the economy on its shoulders. "Maybe 90% of people will go smoke pot and play video games, but if 10% of the people go create incredible new products and services and new wealth, that's still a huge net-win," Altman says. "And the American puritanical ideal that hard work for its own sake is valuable -- period -- and that you can't question that, I think that's just wrong." [...] The complaint Altman addressed on the Freakonomics podcast is a common one. Study after study, however, has shown that giving people extra money makes them feel financially secure. That security ends up leading to empowerment, not de-motivation.
I have a suggestion, rather than everyone sitting around drawing conclusions out of their asses, lets see what actually happens when someone tries it. Let them prove or disprove it and then we will have some results to examine and criticize.
Been done, forty years ago. And the results (WARN: PDF) seem fairly positive. Now, one test is never good enough but it didn't reduce the town to a smoking ruin. So why shouldn't we throw some more at the wall and see what sticks?
Oh please, this isn't that hard. The Basic Income is simple: everyone gets the same amount, period. (As I understand it; if I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but I don't think I am.) You don't get more money for living in NYC than in Bumfuck, Idaho. So if that basic monthly paycheck (which isn't going to be a whole lot by NYC standards) isn't enough for you, then you need to pack up and move somewhere cheaper. But guess what? Now that you have a guaranteed basic monthly income, you have money to move, and you don't have to worry about losing your job and not having a source of income, so you can afford to abandon the high-price city and move someplace cheaper and see if it works out for you. If it doesn't work out and there's no jobs there or you just plain hate it, no problem, you still have that basic income, so you can pack up and move again. Moving isn't that expensive when you don't have a lot of stuff anyway, the problem is the danger of losing your job and that paycheck, and not finding a new one in the new location. BI solves that.
Now, with that out of the way, real estate prices are pretty simple: leave them to market forces (to an extent). If a city makes itself so expensive that all the janitors and cooks and meter maids can't afford to live and work there, oh well! They'll have to figure out a solution on their own, such as building some lower-income housing, or they can just suffer the consequences.
In fact, this will probably be a really GOOD thing for getting rents lower: with the lowest-income people no longer required to work for a living, and only working because they want more money so they can buy iPhones or whatever (BI isn't going to provide them enough money for any luxury, just the basics), they're not going to put up with shitty jobs in high-rent cities any more, a bunch of them are going to move out to cheaper places. It'll be better for them to move to the middle of nowhere, collect their BI check, and smoke pot or watch TV or maybe start a small business than to hang around some ultra-high-rent city like NYC working their ass off just to pay the rent (or commuting for hours every day to live someplace more affordable) because the BI isn't close to sufficient to pay the rent there. This will force rents to come down in those cities, one way or another.
So, for your SanFran example, the city will basically implode, which is a good thing. Usually, things need to completely fall apart before people will fix them.
English speaking countries have a LONG history of wanting to punish people taking public money to survive. Look into the poor houses of 1700s where by law they could serve nothing but gruel and the patrons were required to work 18 hours a day in back breaking labor or they didn't even get their gruel. They were forbidden from leaving, if they by chance got their hands on money it was immediately seized.
I have no doubt in my mind there are people right now in the US and reading this forum that think such a thing would be a great idea.