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Y Combinator Plans To Start Doling Out $60 Million Next Year to Study Universal Basic Income (gizmodo.com)
The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants. From a report: The test is partially intended to see if receiving routine payments will quell anxieties around losing jobs to automation. As Wired reports, the study will be called "Making Ends Meet." Under the plan, a thousand people would get $1,000 per month and the other 2,000 would get $50 per month to serve as a control group. Some of the participants would receive monthly payments for three years and some would get paid every month for five years. Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, a highly successful startup accelerator that helped give rise to companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, announced the company's plans to research universal basic income -- or as he put it, "giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached" -- in a January 2016 blog post. Altman explained his belief that universal basic income will eventually be implemented across the nation as more jobs are automated and "massive new wealth gets created."
But you will be forced — at gun point, which is how all taxes are collected — to pay for somebody else doing it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When I was 5 years old I figured out that if everyone has $1,000,000 dollars everyone would be rich.
I realized when I was 10 why if everyone had $1,000,000 nobody would be rich.
Sure, this experiment will work because the source of the money isn't other people's money and it isn't inflation.
When the source of the money is inflation or other people's money, that $12,000 a year will be sunk into rent increases and increased home prices, amongst other things.
I think the idea for UBI is that, while you may not be eating out buying filet mignon, you can at least survive on it.
Is $1,000 survivable? It is significantly less than minimum wage, which people already struggle with.
I can tell you my forecast: Someone will figure out that since there are no strings attached, they can offer these people loans at high interest, paid for by the $1k per month. So they'll be just as poor as before, but perhaps have a car for a while, and someone else gets richer.
But you will be forced - at gun point, which is how all taxes are collected - to pay for somebody else doing it.
The implication is that you wouldn't be paying for "somebody else" otherwise, but reality is that you do. Like our little eGamer wacko recently, I bet he didn't have the assets to cover all the medical expenses he caused, much less if he had to pay restitution to everyone from the inconvenienced to the deceased's relatives. Even if there's health insurance and whatnot that just means the costs gets smeared broad and thin. And anything but anarchists wants law and order so somebody's paying cops and judges and prisons and it's not the penniless perp. Heck it could be simple things like theft, or even if not theft then the cost of the anti-theft system you need to keep thieves away. Maybe you think UBI is a poor strategy of appeasement, but taxes is far from the only way you end up with the bill. Less desperate people do less desperate things, of course it's no miracle worker but it helps.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's usually how it goes. You like the idea of everyone having everything they need, so you support a guy who says he can make it happen. Next thing you know you're wiping your ass with worthless $1,000 bills and killing feral dogs in the streets to feed your family for dinner.
And then you wonder how it could possibly have happened when wealth distribution has worked out SO well every other time it's been tried ....
Where does Y Combinator's money come from? How can their investors possibly benefit from this?
By keeping their heads off pikes the day a neural network become cheaper than a highschool graduate.
Please stop believing Fox News and Trump. We are FAR from FULL employment. Many people are under-employed, barely able to keep themselves afloat in the current economy. Millions have yet to back peddle from the crash of '08. Many more, whose numbers are NOT counted, have fallen through the cracks entirely. Speak only for yourself.
It is basic because it's minimal. The idea isn't that you get a check and don't work. It's that you get a head start to supplement a job. The problem with welfare is that those on it don't look for work because it effects their benefits. This doesn't, so while the 12k isn't livable, the 12k+ minimum wage job is.
It is universal because everyone in the control group gets it, regardless of their situation.
It will fail because you run out of other peoples money.
I'm curious as to how you think that this could reduce wages. My line of thinking is that with a substantial portion of people looking at just staying home if the pay isn't worth it, that pay will have to increase to lure people out.
As such, businesses that assume they can pay less because of the UBI will discover that said potential employees decide that just staying home is better.
I figure that market forces will tend to adjust such that living on just the UBI sucks enough, and working improves that enough, that most people still end up working.
I don't read AC A human right
It's eminently feasible - We're currently producing X amount of real wealth (goods and services, not money) and distributing it among Y people without trouble. If technology changes so that far less labor is required to produce the same amount of wealth, that doesn't inherently change anything - you can still distribute the wealth in the exact same way without any physical problems.
If you're accustomed to thinking in terms of wealth in terms of money, payed in exchange for man-hours of labor, then if technology lets you produce 10x the real wealth per man-hour, then that hour is now worth 10x as much if it's paid in terms of value created. So, let everyone work 4 hours a week instead of 40 and get the same paycheck. The economy continues as it has, except everyone has a lot more free time on their hands to enjoy what they're buying.
Alternately you could pay one person 10x as much, and let the other 90% eat cake. That has a problem though, even if you can handle the riots to your satisfaction - because now there's only 1/10th as many people with money to spend on buying your goods, and odds are very good they're not going to buy10x as many things - in general, the more money people have, the more they invest. Say they buy 5x as much - now your factories only need to build half as many widgets, so you lay off half your workers. And so the number of people with money to spend halves, so you halve production again... And the whole time, the income of the investors is crumbling.
It's a vicious downward spiral that demonstrates the fundamental truth that jobs are created by consumers, not investors. The wealth of the top is sustained by the spending of the masses, any serious disruption of that can bring the entire house of cards falling down.
As for the masses being dependent on the few giving them money - why? Make them investors instead, up front. It's not like the few are inherently worthy of the wealth they lucked into - for the most part if they had been switched at birth it would be someone else sitting in their position now. They don't also don't generate any wealth themselves - investing only leverages wealth - the wealth is always ultimately created by the laborers - if your hard work made it possible for the company to amass enough wealth to automate away most the jobs, why shouldn't you own a share of that new equipment?
One mechanism I like to implement such a thing is to require that X% of the stock of all corporations or other such liability limiting/wealth concentrating legal tools always automatically and irrevocably belongs to the country's citizens, with control distributed equally, as just part of the cost of being able to hide behind legal fictions when shit hits the fan (it would also greatly discourage the use of shell corporations to dodge liability, as every shell would cost you another X% of asset dilution)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I respectfully disagree. UBI won't change my life. I'm still going to work. However, I work for a company that sells goods and services to other businesses that deal with all walks for life from the .01% to the poorest. By giving my customer's customers more money in their pocket, it all comes back to me in the form of higher wages, higher profitability, and better returns on my stock options.
This is stimulating the economy on the low end. As someone who is a productive member of society, this benefits me in the form of my company's profitability selling goods and services. As an added bonus, there is less incentive for the poorest to commit crime. The homeless, destitute, and drug addicted can afford to get treatment and stop harassing me on the street and scaring my small children. There are less evictions, less repossessions and the economy becomes much smoother. A bolstered middle class benefits everyone in the short term, medium term, and long term.
I will happily pay more taxes for higher wages, less suffering of the poor, less fear of my kids being a victim of violent crime. I'm not even sure UBI would raise my taxes substantially, but I am happy to give it a try. One thing is clear, the current system is failing, income inequality is getting depressingly worse, and while I have a good job, life is getting worse every year for all those around me. I see no future on our current path. I think a well implemented UBI program will protect the masses from the job losses that are coming due to automation and ensure a healthy flow of income to buy goods and services and keep our economy running smoothly. I want people to be able to afford my company's products.
To me, UBI is not a charity program, but an investment that looks like an inevitability.
6k/yr, seriously? Where can you live on 6k/yr? You'd need to increase that at least five fold.
The funding is simple, every share of stock in publicly held companies goes into a non-voting public trust, every new share issued thereafter is duplicated with a share going into public trust. No matter how many layers of paper or indirection are used the same is applied to foreign arms and interests of companies held by US citizens so that folding and reopening in another nation doesn't escape the policy.
In this manner as society phases out work and automated away jobs, centralizes, takes advantage of foreign labor pools, etc. Those who actually built all that technology and processes, efficiencies etc and their children are taken care of and their interests and support remain tied to progress and innovation even if their contribution isn't directly in the form of labor. Additionally, the net result may result in some shift of wealth but maintains proportion of wealth so that it doesn't trample upon the portion of wealth which has followed merit.
Really? So Wesley Snipes wasn't in prison for tax evasion?
It's not (only) about the monetary situation, it's more about a feeling of security and safety. If I feel secure, I can take higher risks, quit my job and start a business myself even if I am unsure whether it's gonna take off. If there's nothing to fall back on, people would rather stay with a job that's probably not as productive but at least safer.
But in an economy that thrives on exploiting workers, something like this is anathema, I know.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, sure.
Did the free money we pump into banks increase inflation? Or where do you think the bailouts come from? When you deposit 100 bucks with your bank, your bank lends out 1000 of them. Yes, I'm not kidding. Where do you think that money comes from? You don't pay back? No worries, here's a loan of 1100 to cover the 1100 you owe us. Of course you don't get that money, it's just now in your book as debt. And you suddenly owe us 1100 of the 1000 we gave you. Did that free money increase inflation?
Money is numbers on an account. Nothing else. Inflation, like pretty much all in this economy, is artificial. A tool to direct money and its flow. Your economy, like any economy in the developed world, relies mostly on services. Services, like money, can be multiplied at will. At least as long as you have available workforce. So unless your unemployment rate is very close to 0 (and please don't try to bullshit with the "official" numbers, you know as well as I do that the "official" unemployment numbers of the US have nothing to do with how many people are looking for a job), you can easily multiply your service offer ... which only happens of course if there is demand, since you can hardly store services.
Poor people are now also the demographic that gladly and very willingly spends money on services. In other words, here's your chance to drive your economy forward.
Of course, if your goal is just to have a cheap, dependant workforce to maximize your own profit and to hell with the general economy, this would certainly be not in your interest.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh no, the boat people have been living on is sinking! Let's make new boats and keep people floating on the boats forever!
Nothing is more permanent than 3-5 years because that's how often governments change.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC