Slashdot Asks: Which is Better, a Basic Income or a Guaranteed Job? (timharford.com)

Barack Obama said this month that AI research is accelerating, making it harder to find jobs for everybody, and concluding "we're going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income."

But a Financial Times columnist adds that "an intriguing debate has broken out over how to look after disadvantaged workers both now and in this robot future. Should everyone be given free money? Or should everyone receive the guarantee of a decently-paid job?" An anonymous reader quotes some of the highlights: Psychologists have found that we like and benefit from feeling in control. That is a mark in favour of a universal basic income: being unconditional, it is likely to enhance our feelings of control. The money would be ours, by right, to do with as we wish. A job guarantee might work the other way: it makes money conditional on punching the clock. On the other hand (again!), we like to keep busy. Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (UK) (US) have found that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind". And social contact is generally good for our wellbeing. Maybe guaranteed jobs would help keep us active and socially connected.

The truth is, we don't really know... It is good to see that the more thoughtful advocates of either policy -- or both policies simultaneously -- are asking for large-scale trials to learn more.
He titled the column "The secret to happiness after the robot takeover." But what say Slashdot readers?

Is it better to be given a basic income -- or a guaranteed job?

Comments

Neither.

[Chas]

Both are "shit sandwich" choices.

Paying people not to work destroys the ability to achieve.

Putting people into do-nothing jobs destroys the desire to work.

Both damage the economy.

One by raising cost of living to compensate for unearned payouts.
The other by depressing wages.

So, which shit sandwich will YOU take a bite of?

Re:Distopian future..

[w3woody]

The number of bureaucrats you need to administer a system is in proportion to the complexity of that system, not the size. The idea of UBI (as it was originally conceived) was to reduce or eliminate nearly all the decision making (and thus, complexity) inherent in the original welfare system by replacing it with something much simpler--and inherently much more fair, as simplicity strips arbitrariness from a system.

Re:Distopian future..

[w3woody]

You're joking that a UBI replaces everything, right?

I'm not. That was the original idea, floated by the likes of Milton Friedman and others. And his reasoning was not about redistribution or about "fairness" or about providing a better welfare program to the poor. It was about eliminating the arbitrariness of the existing federally- and state-administered programs by replacing the existing complex welfare and tax deduction systems with a simple payment scheme.

You think fraud goes away like magic?

Of course not. There will be plenty of people who try to continue to collect a deceased loved-one's UBI, for example.

But the fewer rules and the fewer decisions that have to be administered, the fewer decision makers and administrators are required to police the system. And when the only rule for collecting a UBI is "are you alive?", it makes administration and policing far easier than, for example, the current system which may require an investigator to determine your salary, if you were paid under the table, if the child you declared as a dependent actually lives with you at least 181 days out of the year, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.