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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."
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
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.
By keeping their heads off pikes the day a neural network become cheaper than a highschool graduate.
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 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.
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.
You can squeak by miserably on 12k /year. Maybe not where you live but you probably live somewhere with a healthy economy. I know plenty of places where 1000/mo is enough for an apartment or a room, some bus fare, and groceries.
I'm one of them. Just a few hundred or so over $12,000 for me. It's not much, but it works for the basics.
I'm on disability and I don't work, but if I had UBI instead, I could try getting a job again or even try starting my own business. I don't know if I can handle working because it's been a long time since I've worked. Unfortunately, if I start working again right now, my disability will be cancelled. Before anyone starts chastising me about work ethic or being a leech or whatever, just read on for a bit to understand why this could risk ruining my life.
If I were to have my disability cancelled, I would be giving up guaranteed money (which I need for rent and food), plus basic dental coverage, plus prescription drug coverage (which saves me about $1,500 a month) and trading it for the possibility of a little bit more money (which I don't need, but would be nice), minus all the benefits that I would have to start paying for out of pocket. If I were to lose my job or if my business were to flop before it ever gains any momentum, I'd have to go through months of waiting for approval after reappling for disability. Sometimes this process can take over a year if my application is rejected, because that would force me to go through several bureaucratic stages of appeal. During all of that time I'd have no means of paying rent or eating food.
The end result is that I could become homeless as a result of trying to get employed. That terrifies me, so I'm going to stay on disability and let the rest of my country feed and shelter me until we get a better solution. The idea of UBI doesn't just sound interesting or appealing to me, it feels like my only way back into the work force. I miss work. I'd like to go back to actually earning my money again. It felt really good. This was over ten years ago. The stigma of being unemployed is terrible. Those of you who have a job -- or better yet, a career you enjoy -- consider yourselves fortunate, and please think of the complexities before you harshly judge someone who doesn't work.
I may not be employed, but I'm not stupid. I can do the math and assess the risks. Working simply doesn't make sense for me. It's too much of a gamble.
I unfortunately believe that UBI won't end up being the utopian approach to welfare that many seem to think its aimed at being.
In the UK, since the 1990s there has been a big rise in private landlords who refuse to rent to "DSS recipients" (although its not been called DSS for years, the term these days refers to anyone receiving housing benefit). Yes, its illegal discrimination, but it still happens and its on the increase rather than the decrease.
And you can't really blame the private landlords for doing it, as they have some very good reasons.
Coupled with the rise of refusal to rent to housing benefit recipients is the various changes that successive governments have put in place - and the biggest of them all was the switch from local governments paying housing benefit directly to the landlords to instead paying that benefit to the tenant, who is supposed to pay their rent just like anyone else. It was done as a means of "empowering" those on welfare, to give them more visibility of their money and let them feel more in control.
Unfortunately, it led to a massive rise in evictions for non-payment of rent. A lot of those tenants stopped paying their rent and instead bought big screen TVs, holidays, luxury items etc and then used the courts to stall eviction processes (which can take months), leaving landlords with huge debts that were never going to be cleared.
Housing benefit also hasn't risen in line with other government changes which have made owning property to rent significantly more expensive - for instance, landlords can no longer claim tax relief on income that covers the mortgage payments, so to cover that loss rents have to rise, but housing benefit has stayed stagnant meaning more tenants cannot afford to pay the market rate.
So now its hard to find property to rent if you are on housing benefit, either because no one wants to rent to you or because you are priced out of the market by the very government that is supporting you.
UBI might benefit some astute people, but I think using it to replace normal welfare without checks and balances in place will simply lead to more of the above - a lot of people will treat it as free money for luxury items and we are back to square one.
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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC