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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."
is breaking down! Let's make new chains and keep people dependent on the system forever!
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.
When I was 25 years old I figured out that $1,000,000 invested in an index fund would increase in value enough to account for inflation and give an income of $2000 a month in perpetuity.
Also when I was 25, I figured out that any reduction of the workforce would push wages up and make jobs better by way of competition from supply and demand.
Also also, I noted that you don't need to give everyone the income immediately. Having a lottery will take people out of the workforce gradually, which could be funded over time in a reasonable way. Each $1 billion spent this way takes 1,000 people out of the workforce.
I noticed many things when I was 25, including that if you took all the entitlements programs and simply gave the money out with no regulatory oversight, you could have 5 times as many people using entitlements.
Looking at the cost of entitlements, it's clear that we *could* start moving people off of welfare and related services and eventually get to UBI or something close to it, with no increase in taxes.
Individual productivity keeps rising, and it's pretty easy to see that UBI has to happen.
Or if it doesn't, then we're in for a world of hurt as all the goods and services needed by everyone are made by fewer and fewer people, while the people who can't find a job either starve or revolt.
I'm from Argentina. We don't have universal basic income. But we have high taxes and the previous administration left 22 million "passives" (government employeees, retirees and especially "social plan" benefitiaries). And 8 million "active" workers.
The fiscal hole is so big we're heading to another economic crisis.
The crisis in Venezuela makes people from there come here and easily get a job. People from here don't work. You see them outside the government-owned post and government-owned banks making huge lines. Young people in good shape and health. Perfectly fit to work. But the just, you know, don't.
And inflation is eating away their benefits. Instead of getting jobs, they are now protesting. They demand more free money.
This does not end well. All of the "universal income" programs ignore one simple fact: people are shit and they abuse every system they can abuse.
How can their investors possibly benefit from this?
By society not collapsing. It may well happen that the only other approach is a severe restriction on automation. An UBI could be an alternative to that that actually costs less. Bit this is _research_. As in "we do not know yet".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
2) Even if it's true that technically UBI is financially neutral for most people, in practice, due to inflation, most people will be worse off.
If a majority are revenue neutral then there wouldn't be massive inflation. Everyone would still have approximately the same amount of money to spend. It's basically a restructuring of welfare for people on welfare and a tax and give back for people working and if a person loses their job there is no need to apply for welfare as they are already receiving it.
That being said, I find these 3 year studies stupid. Either study existing income for life lottery winners or work with an existing lottery to set up your exact criteria. Income for life lottery winners would be much more accurate than a short term study. 3 years isn't even long enough to quit your job and go back to college.