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With a guaranteed income to fall back on, it would be much easier for jobs to rely on market forces for wage-setting, and not need a minimum wage. After all, potential employees would have a better choice.

True, but you do have to be careful of companies taking advantage of the state - think Walmart in the US and how many of their employees still rely on public assistance. Zero minimum wage had the potential to set up a near zero cost workforce if the minimum wage isn't actually enough to be picky with employment.

Walmart isn't known for being a great place to work. If people can live at minimum without having to work, Walmart can kiss its artificially cheap workforce goodbye.

Known by whom? Several members of my family work at Walmart, and they really don't have anything bad to say about it.

Yeah why work at a crappy McJob when you could instead do what you find interesting, making weird pottery and selling it on Etsy while relying on the minimum income to cover your rent and food?

I think a significant result of these sort of minimum income ideas would be an explosion in the amount of people that opt for risky entrepreneurial ventures (eg. a startup) instead of working bad jobs for the basic necessities. I think many people would rather make art or pursue other risky, generally low income, creative careers than do low skill, uninteresting work.

A result could be that companies offering low skill, minimum wage jobs could have to raise wages or improve their jobs in other ways in order to attract workers.

Most likely those jobs will be aggressively automated, with more investment that would be previously to make up for the higher cost of labor. Just as Uber openly wants to eventually get rid of their drivers, I don't see why fast food chains wouldn't want to have a fully automated drive through restaurant in 100 years. Either that or they will have to differentiate to produce more value by having a friendlier and higher quality staff, like one might see at Chick-fil-A

People don't think nearly aggressively enough about what "automated" means. In the 18th century, farmers were 90% of the labor force. By the end of the 19th, they were less than 40%. Now, they're around 2%.

Automation is not a new thing. Imagine if the people who built the pyramids had trucks.

I agree, but I am skeptical of the information age's ability to guarantee employment for a large proportion of the population relative to agriculture (when everyone had to work for there to be enough food) and industrialization (where industry required a large human labor force).

There was a commenter on HN who said once: "When cars replaced carriages, did the horses get new jobs?"

I'm curious how low that workforce could be paid, though.

I mean, lets pretend you get $400/w from the government, and you are okay living on that. Now lets assume you decide you want a new toy, or some general spending money. Your base government income has your rent and food paid for, but you want fun money.

How much time is that fun money worth? Would you work a whole week for $50? What about $200?

I also wonder if there's a bit of a mental incentive to push you to better yourself. If you're working a week for $200, maybe you consider it a waste of your time. So, you fight for a better job, maybe through training or education. Now you've got plenty of fun money, but you also start to raise your base lifestyle (and income requirements).

I don't think any of these are absolutes of course, i'm just curious what would happen in these sort of environments. Everything i say here is a question, not an answer.

I believe most people want to do something valuable with their time. But valuable doesn't always translate 1:1 to fungible with money. Raising a child is work. Ministry is work. Volunteering is work. Art is mostly just hard work.

There's this concept throughout American politics, and I don't think it's at all true, that most people are just lazy thieves, and would happily sit on their butts watching reruns all day if they could sponge off others to do it. Of course, no one putting this theory forth thinks it applies to them - they want to work hard for the sheer pride of it.

I do, however, think there's a massive tradeoff of doing a dayjob that you hate to keep a roof over your head, versus doing something you love that won't really generate cash. I'd go farther and say many of the best-paying jobs pay well not because they're high-skilled, but rather because they're low-morality. If you're willing to do unethical things to people, you can make a lot of money, legally.

At any rate, if people want a better than minimum standard of living, they'll get a job. If they have an alternative, they're more likely to do a job they love. And a lot of people would do stuff they love for no "job" at all, if it was a choice.

> There's this concept throughout American politics, and I don't think it's at all true, that most people are just lazy thieves, and would happily sit on their butts watching reruns all day if they could sponge off others to do it. Of course, no one putting this theory forth thinks it applies to them - they want to work hard for the sheer pride of it.

What people will tell you about other people is much more reliable than what they'll tell you about themselves.

It'll be interesting if people can choose jobs freely and wages are purely determined by supply and demand, then those jobs people love to do tend to pay lower, while menial jobs people don't want to do tend to pay higher.

I have a lot of friends who are professional artists - musicians, actors, painters, etc. They are all very talented, hardworking, professional-minded people who could have much more lucrative jobs in the mainstream workforce.

That's norm. What's more interesting is that, if everybody gets choice, will some of blue-collar jobs such as janitors actually gets paid a lot more? Somebody has to do it, after all. (I'm not disgracing those jobs; as Prof. Maguire told Will in "Good Will Hunting", there's honor in it. But is it the case that their wage kept low because they're taken advantage of, having no other choices?)

One place to look for an answer is kids who live at home. They also have unconditional support from the family in terms of rent and food. But plenty of them are happy to flip burgers for some extra cash. There are of course many different situations they find themselves in, and it would be interesting to see how closely they decide things compared to adults on an unconditional grant.

Since most are looking at this from 1 direction (giving the poor additional money) you should consider the question from the other direction (having the wealthy pay more). Will the wealthy stop working as hard, earning less money or retire altogether?

There's no inherent morality to the corporate bottom line (one of the biggest flaws in "free market" thinking is that if a theory is beautiful, it must also be moral). If corporations can get the government to help subsidize employment, they'll do so.

The only solution to exploitation is to make "do nothing" a viable alternative. Right now, in America at least, welfare is a difficult and humiliating process. Employment is the only way to have any dignity at all, and employers exploit that - they underpay for awful jobs, and force employees to rely on welfare anyway. And this isn't even considering all those whom, for whatever reason, aren't really able to work. Physical or mental health, family needs, and more can all impair the ability to do a job even if one is available, and the government supported alternatives are, again, difficult and humiliating.

If employers were forced to compete not against humiliation, but rather against choice, they'd have to make the jobs suck less and pay more. Even burger-flipping would need to start getting decent treatment, the kind those of us in high demand jobs have come to expect.

>> The only solution to exploitation is to make "do nothing" a viable alternative.

Yes. I've been leaning toward that idea. Retired people need to be able to do nothing, and why not most people? If you want to live in a small house and grow your own food, why should that be prevented? Property taxes need to be zero for people, and cost of living needs to be as close to zero as possible. Then you don't need higher wages or welfare for people to get by. Instead we give tax breaks to companies and tax the heck out of people. Then wonder how to support those who can't work, or don't have in-demand skills. Speaking of skills, how about low cost education instead of government backed free for all in tuition costs?

>There's no inherent morality to the corporate bottom line (one of the biggest flaws in "free market" thinking is that if a theory is beautiful, it must also be moral)

Actually they think something even more naive, that the individual immoralities and egoisms at play (maximizing individual profit) work out for the benefit of all in the end.

Generally speaking people make the argument that maximizing individual profit is inevitable. Socialist systems simply make the group of people that maximize individual profit very small.

In reality the difference between capitalism and communism has nothing to do with money, it is about control. In capitalism those with money (who made previously successful economic decisions) mostly decide. In communism the government (who are people too) decide directly.

The problem with government decisions/communism is that people always seem to refuse to accept reality in some way. Something must keep existing, and damn the economic impact. Then the impact becomes significant compared to the size of the economy, and the system dies.

Capitalism forces governments to accept the confines of reality (mostly), communism does not. This is unfortunately exactly the problem most socialist thinkers have with it. For example, climate change might be unsolvable under capitalism. What you don't realize is that this is a good thing, not a bad thing, as the only alternative is to expend all resources we have in a failed attempt at achieving that. The only thing that would happen if we did that, of course, is the collapse of our society. (just using this as an example, I'm not saying preventing climate change is unachievable)

>After all, potential employees would have a better choice.

And I would think employers who are looking for more motivated employees would benefit as well. And I hope the opposite is true for employers who are just looking for bodies at a low cost as the sole factor.

I'm interested to see how things will be a couple months after the program is in full bloom.

employers who are just looking for bodies

I think a lot of bad stuff gets done by employers when they reach such a state. It's very analogous to website owners who just want to create a volume of views, regardless of quality. Or to game companies that want to extract as much money from their players, regardless of the experience they are producing.

Or academia where people think that just because they can get a post-doc (doesn't matter what country), research assistant, volunteer, etc to do work of marginal value (yes, most papers and "research" out there wont move respective field forward at all) just because they have the skills. I think our societies are filled with this level of rot and the more/faster ways people put a flame thrower to such, the better.

This touches on Taylorism ("scientific management"), one of the more horrible things that has happened to human society. Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the favorite industrial theorist of both the Harvard Business School and Josef Stalin, which should set off all alarms right there.

In Taylorism, "skills" are replaced with "processes". Employees are taught to do small, simple, repeatable, and thoroughly documented processes, without understanding of how the whole system works. This covers huge swaths of manual labor today - both factory labor and service jobs like fast food tend to be heavily Taylorized.

The value of Taylorism isn't that it's more efficient than relying on skilled workers. It's less efficient, and unashamedly so. But it has the side effect of disempowering the worker. Employees are now replaceable cogs, to be fired on a whim and replaced by the next warm body who can be taught the steps (and punished even for improving on them). Taylorism shifts the balance of power between employer and employee strongly in the employer's favor.

The only "safe" jobs in a Taylorized society are those that demand skills immune to Taylorizing, like engineering (and that's mostly because any job I do that can be replaced with a dumb human process can also be replaced with a program).

In principal I like the idea of a basic income as well, but I too wonder about what services/assistance it will replace. For example SNAPS/food stamps would seem to be a prime candidate.

But I wonder (and this is an honest question) are we, as a society, really (practically, politically, and philosophically) going to take a hard line with someone that lost their check at the local casino - and tell them "tough luck, sounds like a hungry few weeks ahead"?

How about someone who borrows money and needs their entire check to repay lenders, leaving nothing to live on?

What we choose as a society doesn't have to be carried out by government. In a basic income system you are still free to start a charity that focuses on helping people with gambling addiction. In fact, it will be easier now because you will have your own basic income to lean on as you get the charity started.

Agreed that private parties can choose to do what they like - but my question is whether the gov't position on a go forward basis would be "you got your check - we have no further obligation"I think that position would be hard to carry out politically + the risk of moral hazard should that in fact not be the case.

I'm not a Basic Income expert, but radically simplifying government welfare seems to be a major selling point whenever I read about it. I too always wonder what exactly that means. How much would actually get cut? Will there still be trade tariffs? Farm subsidies? Student loans? etc., etc.

I think the actual goal should be to have government programs that provide an acceptable standard of living without money. Basic income is both a necessary patch for problems too individual to solve this way, and the single most straightforward way to get started, but it's not a panacea that removes the need for all other programs.

A Mandatory read and interesting discussion to follow every time the subject of "basic income" is brought up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10522880

If you make a change like this though, I think a lot of other adjustments logically follow.

Yes, that's the tricky part.

I seem to be politically moderate on this issue, in that I am in favour of some form of social security safety net for the essentials, but I also think any government aid beyond that needs to be limited so those who do more also see more benefit in return. A guaranteed basic income seems like an interesting idea that could work as part of a wider reform of our social security framework.

Perhaps it could be combined with some form of public service requirement for those who want to claim it, so it would be more like a guaranteed job available to as many people as need it than a hand-out. This could be used to support useful activities that aren't run commercially, such as looking after local neighbourhood amenities, or helping at your kid's school if you have useful skills to share, or even going abroad to help with aid work after a natural disaster. Instead of the state social security apparatus concentrating on who qualifies or doesn't qualify for which benefits, with sometimes controversial or unfair results, maybe it could concentrate on recognising valuable activities and helping those otherwise without a job to contribute to them.

Next you have the issue of private and public sector employment. Maybe set a statutory minimum wage for employing someone full-time that is a modest but noticeable amount above the basic income level? Tax any form of income above that level, adjust in some reasonable way for people who are working part-time, and adjust in reasonable ways to support those who have other genuine responsibilities or disabilities, and this seems like the basis for a system where work does pay but if you're ever the unlucky one for a while then you aren't getting punched when you're down. Maybe it could even support a different kind of lifestyle for the type of person who likes contributing to their community in practical ways and doesn't much value material things or financial wealth.

I also wonder whether, given the shifting population patterns and increasing debt particularly among the young that we have in the West today, we should place a lot more emphasis on social housing, even if that just means a modest dorm-style room and some basic communal facilities so everyone can have somewhere to eat, sleep and wash. It seems to me that this would be a natural fit with the idea of giving everyone a basic safety net and an opportunity to move up to enjoy things beyond the essentials in exchange for taking on better paid work.

How does this get rid of the 'poverty trap' by spreading free money to every person?