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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I'm cautiously enthusiastic about basic income. I want to believe that it really can change everything, until that nagging doubt of "but human nature just doesn't work that way!" inevitably kills the buzz.

The idea behind basic income is to remove day-to-day struggle from people's lives. If only they didn't have to worry where their next rent check is coming from, then potentially a huge groundswell of human capital could rise out of nowhere and carry us all into a new age.

But we don't need to actually implement basic income in order to test that out. Plenty of people already receive checks from the government every month that they live on, in exchange for no real work responsibilities. Like, a whole lot of people. There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people. Not to belittle them and their abilities, but there isn't. Just about everything that we consider a real advance comes from people working the system that exists using their own ingenuity, not from people allowed to escape the system by providing them an inalienable source of income.

Modern Western societies are rich enough that smart, motivated individuals can mostly rise to the level of their own ability. To do better than that we need to build a better society, not just make the one we have richer. Basic income could be an important step, but it's only one step.

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Except that there are strong social incentives for anyone who is capable of getting a paying job and going off welfare to do so.

If it were socially acceptable for an artist, scientist or entrepreneur to fall back on "welfare" for some amount of time to work on a project, improve themselves or bootstrap a startup, I think you'd see that more often (including outcomes that end up contributing back to society.

Which is why basic income is such a good idea. If it's unconditional, and not tied to an assertion that "I am poor and cannot feed myself otherwise", I think you'll start to see more capable people leverage it for uses other than basic survival.

It still doesn't answer the question of whether that investment (as a society) would pay off, but its a fair bet that it would at least be a different group of people leveraging it.

Yes! I think you've captured the idea perfectly. It also removes much of the administrative cost of other types of welfare. Cost that's a product of highly complicated rules for who deserves how much welfare.

My point is that basic income should be treated as a welfare program, not as a stimulus package. We are bound to be disappointed in the ROI of basic income if we are looking for it to accelerate social evolution all by itself.

This is a good point. I'd go so far to label it a "social program", because even "welfare program" is a loaded term.

I don't think he's referencing welfare but programs such as disability.

It's not a knock against those with serious disabilities that prevent them from working, but the individuals who sham the system to collect $3k /month in disability pay for their diabetes, and refuse to work. We ALL know someone with diabetes who doesn't sham, but there are lots who do.

The people shamming the system have the ultimate incentives not to have income. If you are shown to be able to work, you have to pay back all the income you've ever received from it.

>Except that there are strong social incentives for anyone who is capable of getting a paying job and going off welfare to do so

Debatable. In the US, many welfare programs are designed to cut off anyone who actually gets a job...even if that job pays less than what you'd get from welfare. This problem gets even bigger as you factor in the fact that multiple welfare programs exist, making it nigh-impossible to prevent that drop from being catastrophic.

This is a major incentive to stay on welfare.

Meanwhile, with a BI, a person who seeks a job will earn more money than one who does not. That's it. No complicated math involved, not even subtraction; a guy who works will have more money than one who does not.

Assuming all the participants want more money, the second set of rules will lead to more work than the first.

One question I have about BI is if it replaces other forms of social welfare (food stamps, unemployment, etc...), what happens when some percentage of people inevitably make decisions and still cannot afford the basics of what BI should cover? Will a new set of social welfare programs replace the ones that were previously removed?

If BI isn't enough to replace existing welfare systems, then it isn't enough. You can't half-ass something like this.

I'm more speaking to what I believe is the inevitability of some people making bad decisions (like buying a bunch of powerball tickets or betting your money at the racetrack or something.) with the money they receive and then not being able to afford the basics.

There would obviously be many people who are benefitted by BI, but my question is more wondering what happens to the percentage of people that end up still needing extra help.

If someone needs extra help after a basic income, clearly they need non-monetary help. Making it easier to distinguish those cases seems like an improvement.

I question how a "BI" can be paid for long-term.

Presumably BI is taxed like any other income, but of course that means the amount of tax revenue collected will not balance the amount of money paid to citizens... unless we really raise the rates on "wealthy" people (who's definition may shift if everyone is provided a free "comfortable" standard of living). In which case this "BI" becomes a Robbin Hood tax on the nation's wealthy, job creators, innovators, etc.

Knowing several people personally that would be likely to only exist off of the BI (and not produce anything, or do anything with their free time), I have my doubts about a BI nation-wide leading to a boom in productivity. This may be a selection bias, but it seems to me as time goes on, we have more and more individuals content to not produce, leaving their days to just games and other "fun" activities.

Are those people you mention actually productive now? Most of the people I know who would do nothing are already doing nothing.

> Are those people you mention actually productive now?

Well, kind of, but only enough to pay rent and eat.

But that's my point, individuals like this, who only work the bare minimum to just keep existing and have no drive or motivation to achieve more, are very likely to just not work anymore at all since their basic needs are now provided.

At the moment, they at least work somewhat. This helps keep local businesses running (even if just barely). With a BI, these folks stop all production and resort to their ideal lifestyle of not doing anything.

It's a little naive to think these individuals will suddenly change in light of all this new-found free time, and run out to create businesses or new things.

We can examine lottery jackpot winners for evidence of what many people would do if they didn't have to worry about money anymore (they do nothing in large part).

I just don't see any scenario where a BI leads to increased productivity like what is being claimed.

In contrast, I can foresee unemployment rates increasing, as fewer individuals participate in the workforce at all (to no determent of themselves, since their standard of living is provided free of cost). This will ultimately put strain on the system since not enough production is happening to offset this behavior, which will lead to drastic measures like dramatically increasing tax rates more and more.

I just don't buy the argument that giving someone a free living without any expectation of productivity in return will lead to a net increase in productivity.

It's different for me. I know a bunch of people who are deeply creative, artists and musicians and such, who spend enormous amounts of time volunteering their productivity - or what's left of it, after "earning a living". I'd love to see them with the opportunity to not have to worry about eating, so they could make things instead.

The conflation of value and money is one of the worst things about our society. Money is, in many ways, units of suck. Jobs pay because no one would do them if they didn't pay.

> I know a bunch of people who are deeply creative, artists and musicians and such, who spend enormous amounts of time volunteering their productivity - or what's left of it, after "earning a living". I'd love to see them with the opportunity to not have to worry about eating, so they could make things instead

Well, I'd love more time for my hobbies too, however it's not realistic to think more time spent doing pleasureful activities will yield more productivity in general. The world is filled with musicians and artists, but very few of them actually produce anything beneficial to society.

Art and music are important components of society, but the influential pieces come from a very small minority, and that's unlikely to change. The successful people are more closely paralleled with an entrepreneur than a typical street artist... they posses the drive and motivation to do what it takes to become great. This involves schooling/training, often more than 40 hour work-weeks, managing people and the business around your work, etc. Everyone else is a hobbyist, producing things for self-consumption in large-part, which does not contribute towards society in a meaningful way.

The people we're discussing here are the types that loathe and bemoan a 20 hour workweek, let alone a 60+ hour workweek the Jay-Z's of the world find routine.

> Jobs pay because no one would do them if they didn't pay.

I disagree. There are many types of occupations which do not pay (volunteer work comes to mind). Further, if there was no means to generate income, there wouldn't be a way to purchase goods, which in turn keeps others employed, etc. In a society where things are all totally provided for free, society will stop innovating (there's no reason to push the boundaries anymore).

Pretty pessimistic - I'd suggest that only a small minority are influential precisely because of the making-a-living issue. Some of the most influential are lucky art-lottery-winners, not geniuses.

And I wouldn't worry about society falling around our ears if the work ethic is replaced by a creative-energy ethic or something like that. I'd love to try it.

I reject the notion that influential music is the only music of value.

Remember, the stuff we want to get rid of by automating is the boring stuff! And we discourage automating it now because our economic model is centered on full employment with abundant labor. What this model has produced is consumer demand that is perpetually shaped by price sensitivity, which encourages bullshit work, bullshit results, and bullshit pay.

We don't need more packaged food with the top ingredients being one or more of "HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, MILK PROTEIN, SOYBEAN OIL". We don't need fashion that falls apart within one season. We don't need pay-to-win video games, or advertorials, or Buzzfeed. Neither do we need gold Apple Watches, $9000 pens, or palatial mansions. Scarcity of our environmental resources is real, but scarcity in manufactured products? Hardly! We can and should shift towards a quality-centric model - practical quality, not slapping gold leaf on everything.

What we have inherited is a way of seeing the world that is not really using our full potential, but is simply insistent that it is the climb to the top that produces the rewards, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. BI is not the solution to all of that, but it will shift the demand profile towards quality in all sectors and allow consumers the option of choosing quality. If some of those consumers are "wasting their time" noodling on a guitar, so what? They aren't working at McDonald's.

Why is this comment grey?

Because political partisan trolls went through and downvoted everything I said on this subject. Happens every time. :(

You are linking human labor to production, which is not necessarily wrong, but not necessarily right either. Many of us who are cautiously supportive of BI think it sounds like an awful idea that is nonetheless one of the few that has a somewhat credible vision of a plausible future where production is almost completely independent of human labor.

That's the rub. I don't believe there's a "plausible future" where production is independent of human labor. Manual labor in assembly lines etc, sure. But humans are cheap. Cheap to build, cheap to feed, cheap to house. Compared with a robot, a human is extremely adaptable to situations and circumstances that far exceed robotic solutions. Now if you handwave and say "but AI" then you're not being realistic.

And never mind "work" that requires more creativity and intelligence. Programming, writing, art, sales, marketing, policing, military, the list goes on and on. There's a reason that humans are at the top of the food chain, and that's our brains and adaptability. The idea that these traits will have no or limited value doesn't track with history.

The free loader problem exists but it's also known that it's essentially an edge case. It's not going to get smaller by making people poor or envious of others so that they work harder. It's a fixed problem.

And this is hardly "a free living", £6000 pounds is $8550. The average monthly Social Security benefit per year is $16092.

Many people tend to think of BI as a solution to a world where scarcity is no longer that much of an issue. In a world where a lot of wealth is created by automation, the picture starts to look different, to the extent that BI becomes not just desirable, but inevitable. At that point, it shouldn't matter too much if those people choose to stay unproductive.

But even now, while those people may not produce, they would certainly still have to consume. So there is some economic activity created. The question, of course, is whether it's enough to support the greater economy and if the incentives to do extra work are good enough.

Also, I sincerely doubt that these people you talk about are the norm. As mentioned in the article, there's certainly evidence that people may tend to get more education, act more creatively, and pursue productivity at a higher rate when they are removed from the fear of poverty – likely because basic needs are met and aren't a primary source of stress.

I think in order for it to be sustainable, it can't be tied to taxation on production, but rather taxes on rent.

For if production goes down, it becomes impossible to fund this entitlement. But if the entitlement is strictly tied to land rent (analogous to the citizen's dividend that Alaskans get for the extraction of natural resources), this can't completely disappear.

I don't think you've captured the nature of the question. If you give everyone a cash handout, some percentage of them might spend all of their allowance on alcohol and lottery tickets, and not have enough left over for food or rent at the end of the month, leaving them hungry and homeless. Under BI, is this situation acceptable, because it is their own fault for "wasting" the money?

If someone can't keep their lives together with a reasonable income, sure it's their fault for wasting their money. I wouldn't say that they don't deserve help at that point, but I would say that it's clear they need some deeper kind of help than money (targeted or not).

If someone is so disabled that BI alone won't save them, then yes, other things will step in. This is a great opening for private charity, in fact. Given BI as a baseline, the conservative dream of having private charity handle things might actually work, because it would be limited to the exception cases.

People can do this currently with food stamps too (by selling them for 80% of face value or whatever), so it's not a new situation. So I'd say yes, we obviously can't give people unlimited funds.

The system we've got now isn't even working quarter-ass. Finding a "replacement" is a pretty low bar.

Also if it replaces the existing complicated system, what happens to the million-odd public sector workers who manage and administer it?

I figure, a BI in the US would be handled through local DMVs (triple acronym combo!) and thus at least some of the officials involved in the old welfare process will be transferred to the DMVs to help keep up. Others will, inevitably, find themselves out of a job; there's a massive, massive number of people in that bureaucracy, far more than we really need even before a BI comes in and makes most of that paperwork obsolete.

The good news is, the money that once went into their paycheck will now be used to fund their Basic Income, and they can find other lines of work.

Someone on benefits who spends all their money on alcohol will find themselves grinding their way through civil debt recovery - their landlord will sue for loss of rent and will evict them from the home; utility companies will sue to recover the debt and will cut off the utilities.

and whether that's BI or benefit makes little difference to that. You get the money and it's up to you what you spend it on, once you've spent it that's it, you don't get another dollop if you make unwise choices.

At least in England someone who becomes homeless through non-payment of rent (even as a result of alcoholism) is declared to have made themselves homeless, and they're not eligible for public housing. They might be able to get emergency accommodation in homeless shelters.

There are some slight complications if children are involved - a parent who causes the children to become homeless through alcoholism is going to find considerable child protection social services involvement in their life, but the presence of children may make emergency bed&breakfast housing available. Those are pretty terrible places. They're often not fit for human habitation, and are over crowded.

> Someone on benefits who spends all their money on alcohol will find themselves grinding their way through civil debt recovery

I think the point being made was, do we continue to provide other welfare services to an individual like this, or do we just cut them loose and let them fail?

Many people would argue we would still have to provide assistance to this individual... so then it begs the question, how is a BI any better than the slew of welfare programs we already run? At this point, wouldn't it be better (and probably cheaper long-term) for the government to just buy all the homes in the nation, and provide them free of cost to anyone? Perhaps food should be free as well.

Your straw man certainly draws a long bow :D

Here are the types of "welfare" that habitual failures might have access to under BI:

- Budgeting advice - Free housing for the homeless - Free psychological consultations - In extreme cases, a controlled spending card (i.e.: an EFTPOS card that can't be used for drugs and gambling)

But we wouldn't give them more money, because they've made a habit of using it badly.

Yes, it replaces all other forms of social welfare. Here in the US at least, the welfare system is problematic enough (bureaucratic snafus, etc) that a robust private charity exists to back things up.

So there are private soup kitchens, food banks, etc. Someone who used up all their basic income would need to turn to friends, family, church, or these private charities.

This ... is complicated.

If you have someone in your family going through Alzheimer's or dementia, you suddenly realize that there is a spectrum of functionality as a human being.

There is no single point where there is changeover from human being who is "functional" and "not functional". There is no bright line where we can say "this person is still responsible for their actions" and "this person is no longer responsible for their actions and the someone must step in".

We, as modern societies, do NOT handle this with any amount of grace.

Then they are not mentally healthy and should be treated as such.

The GP was talking about social incentives. You're talking about monetary incentives. Different things. I agree with the GP. There is a real stigma about being on welfare. Someone close to me would rather be homeless than be on welfare. Homeless in the sense that he sleeps on people's couches, and has for several months.

Why do you assume people behave this way, when there's every indication that human's don't behave with "utopian ideals"? This is exactly why BI is such a terrible idea, along with communism, socialism, and free-market capitalism. The system we have now works "pretty-ok" which is leaps and bounds better than this theory and others which require people to act as "honorable actors".

The counter-argument is that those cheques stop if those people start working. In a worst-case scenario, you can end up with a "dead zone" where you make the same amount of money working 30 hours a week at a poorly-paying job as you get doing absolutely nothing. Why not do absolutely nothing, then? Advocates of UBI stress that the non-means-tested nature of these benefits prevents them from causing that trap. Even if you're only working for a penny, that's an extra penny minus tax that you keep.

Nobody would work those jobs, but on the other hand those jobs exist because companies need that work done. That's what closes the feedback loop and would raise wages to meed their need for basic actual human work. It's an unfamiliar system, but it seems crazy enough to have a chance.

At the very least, it's FAR simpler to run than welfare, because it wouldn't need to be qualified and policed. Those issues are involved in the creation of a crime (cheating welfare) that needn't exist at all under BI.

Immigrants who aren't eligible for welfare yet, would.

> he idea behind basic income is to remove day-to-day struggle from people's lives. If only they didn't have to worry where their next rent check is coming from, then potentially a huge groundswell of human capital could rise out of nowhere and carry us all into a new age.

That is not at all what basic income is about. The point of basic income is not as a means to enable anything; it's a natural byproduct of and solution to a problem, the problem of ever increasing automation removing the need for human labor. There will come a time when exchanging labor for capital is no longer a workable system because the demand for human labor will have collapsed due to automation and robots doing everything. Thus without the ability to sell labor, most people no longer have capital with which to participate in an economy. That's what basic income is meant to solve. It's in no way meant to release human capital to foster in a new age, it's meant to allow humans to live in a new age where labor simply isn't necessary and thus labor based economies no longer exist.

> The point of basic income is not as a means to enable anything; it's a natural byproduct of and solution to a problem, the problem of ever increasing automation removing the need for human labor.

I disagree. Humans tend to create new market segments in response to this problem. Service jobs, creative jobs, people are remarkably effective at finding ways to be productive. Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

Do you seriously think automation means less human labor is needed? I can think of dozens of segments out there that could really use more human capital.

Automation means less labor is needed to produce certain kinds of goods. We can always find things for people to do.

> I disagree. Humans tend to create new market segments in response to this problem.

You can disagree if you like, but you're relying on the past to make your presumption that humans will just create more markets; the future of automation isn't like the past, future automation will include AI and is already doing so. AI changes the game, the future is not like the past, humans won't just do something else. Labor based economies must end at some point, there simply won't be enough demand for labor to keep an economy going.

> Do you seriously think automation means less human labor is needed?

If you don't, you're not paying attention to the world.

> Automation means less labor is needed to produce certain kinds of goods. We can always find things for people to do.

Absolutely wrong; the automation that is coming will leave little for people to do as it'll always be cheaper to have a machine do it and an intelligent machine will be able to do anything a human can. All goods, all services, not just "certain kinds" will be done by machines; your doctor will be a machine, your housekeeper, masseuse, waitress, all of them, robots.

The idea that there's always going to be some way to sell your own labor is antiquated and wrong; basic income is meant as a solution to the collapse of labor markets that is coming from our continued increases in production via automation, and it is coming, and no, there won't be some other job you can do... machines will do all the jobs. Humans will leisure or find other means to feel productive but goods and services will not be distributed by means of a labor based economy.

The labor based economies of the world are on their deathbeds; we're currently calling this structural unemployment due to globalization, it's all the same problem, the future isn't based on human labor or labor based economies.

Haha.

Well, let's cross that bridge when we get there.

That way lies pain, we have to cross that bridge as we get there which we currently are already on; hence the structural unemployment. Self driving cars are going to cause mass unemployment, we're already getting there.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Basic income is a hot topic because forward thinking people who see what's going on in the world right now already see it. You say lets cross that bridge when we get there; that's the point, we're there, you just aren't looking very hard.

It's a hot topic on HN and in a few policy circles. In the grand scheme of things, it's a really small issue, far behind, say, gun control or national security.

The topic of this thread is that a "country" is experimenting with it, that's more than a little interest. It's a small issue in America, for now, for sure; that will change as unemployment creeps up with every new technology hitting the market, cars will start it.

There are 196 countries in the world, give or take a few. The US is at the very tip of economic advancement of all 196. That we would care so much about one's experiments is really quite silly. To make a comparison, Obama cares a little bit about what strategy Apple is taking, but he's got much bigger things on his plate.

Plenty of people worry about not being able to find a job, that's why there is so much talk about unemployment, and why politicians always come up with programs and policies to stimulate job growth.

It's even more common if you count people who hate their jobs.

Whether we've found a solution to that problem, is up to debate. But the problem of allowing everyone to have basic security is real.

Haven't people been saying this since about 1848?

No, they haven't; we're talking about AI here, not industrialization, they were talking about a different problem back then. The two are not comparable, industrialization just pushes humans to do different kinds of labor, AI eliminates human labor, vastly different problem.

This is extremely optimistic. We don't have AI that advanced, or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon. People joke all the time about the crazy stuff that Siri comes up with.

What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs. Waiting tables is a good example here: humans do a terrible job of it, and add 10-20% to your food bill in exchange for screwing up your order. Having a tablet computer on the table for you to place your own order would be better, and some restaurants already do this (like Panera) to some degree. Factory work is another: today's factories are filled with automation, and robots produce better-quality products than humans because they don't make mistakes. Taxi driving is another: we're working on automated cars, so pretty soon "Johnny Cab" will be a real thing, and all those cab drivers will be out of a job. This will extend to truck drivers pretty quickly, probably faster than cabs actually. Fast food cooking is another: McD's already has the job of cooking a Big Mac down to something that someone with almost no training can pick up right away because their machines do most of it, they just have to follow some pictorial directions. People have Roombas to clean their floors.

So what happens when you automate all the simple jobs that don't require an education? Now you have a large portion of the population that's unemployed, and they're really not smart enough to get an education and get a higher-level job, or there's not enough higher-level jobs to go around for them if they are.

It's going to be a long time before engineers, for instance, are replaced by robots (and maybe never), but you don't need smart people to cut grass and rake leaves, and jobs like that are going to go away before long.

> This is extremely optimistic.

It's inevitable.

> We don't have AI that advanced

Correct.

> or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon.

That's incorrect. The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor. AI doesn't have to work like a human to out do a human just as planes don't have to flap their wings.

> What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs.

That is coming, but as things like Watson show, it won't be limited to mindless lower level jobs. All but the more pure intellectual pursuits will gone in very short order. Most jobs, even white collar ones, don't take that much thinking.

> It's going to be a long time before engineers, for instance, are replaced by robots

It's not going to be long at all before the bulk of humanity is replaced by robots; that humans are still useful in the highest levels of intellectual fields is for all purposes irrelevant, the labor based economy will crumble far before unemployment reaches 50%. If robots put the lower half of society out of work, it's game over for our current economic system regardless of whether we have strong enough AI to replace engineers.

I have to disagree about AI and doctors, until at least you can get much better sensing technologies. Computers are only as good as the data you feed them, and someone saying they have a pain in some vague region really isn't enough to diagnose anything accurately. It's why doctors tell people to not use the internet to self-diagnose: they quickly determine they're dying of some rare syndrome when really they just have heartburn. A human doctor can interact with human patients (most of whom are not very logically-minded) and figure this stuff out; a computer can't. Remember, a lot of diagnosing depends on the symptoms a patient self-reports, which is bound to be extremely error-prone. Now, if we get to the point where we have Star Trek-style medical scanners, then things will of course be different, but that's a long ways off.

However, I totally agree about the labor-based economy crumbing well before unemployment reaches 50%. If 30% of the workforce is displaced by automation, our economy won't work any more the way it's set up now. It's why we really need a Basic Income.

Religious fanatics believe that coming off the messiah is inevitable. You don't have any more evidence than they do. This belief that general AI will show up soon and change the world is nothing more than a secular religion.

That's a straw-man. There's plenty of evidence that even limited non general purpose AI will harm the job market enough cause massive social issues; I was very clear, general AI is not necessary for these things to be problems. Self driving cars alone will cause massive unemployment across many sectors over the next decade as it becomes common and unemployment need only get so high before social change is forced.

As for the inevitability of general purpose AI, that's not an unfounded religious belief based on nonsense from the ignorant, it's an obvious and practical step that will be taken because there's every reason to believe it's possible and no reason to believe brains are magical and intelligence isn't achievable, and tons of the smartest people in the world are actively trying to do it. Informed and logical predictions are nothing like superstition and to say there's no evidence is just willful blindness.

They've been working on AI for ages now with little to show for it.

People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago.

The goal posts are continually moved with AI because AI never seems to look quite like human intelligence (though why should it?). AI and ML coupled with robots that are relatively simpler than Rosie from the Jetsons are cheaply out-competing human labor in many sectors today, and an avalanche of new sectors is on the cusp (within 2-5 years, not 20 years). Driverless cars currently outcompete human drivers, and a enormous number of people are currently employed as drivers. The remaining hurdles are regulatory. AI is intelligent enough today to outcompete a lot of humans in the work which is currently putting food on their tables. And I haven't seen the burgeoning industry that readily turns former taxi drivers into productive workers in other industries. The industries that can readily accept taxi drivers are generally shrinking as well (meaning, they've got all the workers they need, more than they need, in fact).

Maybe you're right, and it will all work itself out. Some huge growth industry to which humans are uniquely (at least at first) well suited may spring up in the next couple years. But the crisis is awfully close (taking into account driving occupations alone), and there's no market solution in sight, so it seems like prime time to start looking for non-market solutions.

>They've been working on AI for ages now with little to show for it.

That's just not true, it's just that every time the AI crowd makes something really cool and it becomes used, we stop calling it AI because it doesn't think like we do.

> People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago.

That's also not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

ITER isn't producing any power. If your fusion reactor isn't producing more energy than it consumes, then it's not a useful device. We've had fusion reactors since Philo Farnsworth made his "fusor", but what's always been a pipe dream is one that's actually useful. ITER is not. Go read your own link: they predict it might do something useful in 2027! Whoopee, I can make wild-ass predictions about things over a decade away too, that doesn't mean my predictions are worth anything.

ITER is designed to make more power than it requires, it's now just an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. You said we've made no progress; that is progress, a plant is in construction, yes these things take time but to deny progress is being made is simply incorrect. Having useful fusion, i.e. producing more power than being input is a matter of scale, it can't be done without building a full sized reactor and that's what ITER is, the first full size reactor. That's called progress.

This doesn't sound right to me. The ITER is going to (supposedly, which of course is probably optimistic) take another 10 years to finish. When you have a workable design for something, it does not take multiple decades to build it, unless it's something on a really gigantic scale (like a continent-spanning highway system). It doesn't take remotely as much time to build a full-scale nuclear fission power plant producing many megawatts of power. That means this thing is not a real design, it's still an R&D project where they really don't know if it's going to work as planned or not, and they're going step by step, collecting data, seeing what works and what doesn't, etc.

So, sorry, you can call it "progress" if you want, but there's no evidence that it's going to work as planned until they actually can demonstrate it doing so.

The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor.

Sure, but diagnosing is actually only a small part of a doctors job. We still need someone to get the input to feed into watson, interpret the output from watson and explain the practical consequences of that output to the patient, help decide on the correct course of action for that particular patient and then make sure that that course of action gets carried out.

> Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

Yet, "the dole" provided for J. K. Rowling as well as Noel Gallagher of Oasis before they became famous. I'm sure there are others. We, as a society, would nominally be worse off without these people.

> people are remarkably effective at finding ways to be productive.

That's not because human nature loves busy work. It's because today's economy requires you to be "productive", or starve.

> Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

You know, this is an old fashioned puritan work ethic thing as well; people don't need to be productive, they need to be happy and if they can be happy without "having" to work due to technological advancement that makes work a moot point, why shouldn't they be?

"Productivity" is something we can get more and more from machines and eventually enough of it that the vast bulk of society can move beyond work and enjoy life. Work that isn't required is called a hobby, and our ultimate goal should be to let our tech replace our need to work; it'd be great if everyone just had hobbies they enjoyed and found fulfilling.

Perhaps it's a step along the road to a post-scarcity economy.

That's exactly what it is.

You're both right. I don't see how your point is exclusive of the comment you referenced.

The people who receive checks from the government every month are already preselected for failure. You don't get a government check at random, you get it for being disabled, for being too old to work, for being incapable of holding down any sort of job, etc. Looking at them to see how the population at large might react to basic income is not going to be informative.

Right, so the new check recipients will be people that were otherwise capable of sustaining themselves, as those who aren't are already accommodated. I suspect that the 'human capital' liberated by basic income will mostly find its way to level 400 World of Warcraft Death Knights and 40 000 word critiques of Breaking Bad episodes.

Should the legions of working folk try to actually use their new liberty for anything with more impact we'll ban it.

The idea is that "sustaining themselves" isn't necessarily all that great, and there may be a lot of people out there working minimum-wage jobs barely scraping by who might be able to do something more if they were able to move beyond that.

How many people out there have a way to improve their lives and move forward, but which requires more free time than their minimum-wage job allows? I suspect it's a lot.

The new check recipients who will benefit most include people who currently work, possibly at multiple jobs, but still barely earn enough to get by.

Not in every case and not in every country.

I receive a government payment every month in the form of child support allowance. Everyone's entitled to it in the country where I live, as long as they have children.

I hold down a job and don't believe I'm pre-selected for failure because I claim the welfare allowance I'm entitled to.

That's a good point, but then again you also wouldn't fit into the original point that people receiving government benefits aren't accomplishing things.

Unemployment benefits just aren't like basic income. At all.

1. They're barely enough to feed yourself and pay for rent, if even. Nothing more.

2. The authorities keep you busy filing paperwork and sending applications for awful jobs. Don't meet your quota, miss a deadline, don't make a meeting, or refuse any job (even if quite beneath your qualification), and your benefits are cut.

3. If you're unemployed, long-term planning is impossible.

4. Higher education is not available. Job training may or may not be.

I suspect that most unemployed are by and large less educated -- so what do you expect? Basic income would allow education. And that may, as you put it, carry us into a new age.

Disclaimer: I only know about the situation in Germany, and only from (educated, but not IT) acquaintances, not personal experience.

It's worse in the US. It's essentially beer money.

Cite?

Been on unemployment.

You must drink a lot of beer. The maximum unemployment in Massachusetts, for instance, is over $700 a week. Even in New Hampshire it's over $400.

If the only jobs you can get are ones "quite beneath your qualification", you might rethink the reality of those career qualifications.

The US is a fairly poor example of this as you must be disabled, looking for a job, retired, or raising kids to qualify for long term assistance. And creating something of value is a great way to be kicked off the system and sometimes have to pay that money back.

The EU model is closer to basic income and Harry Potter is one example that does show up from that well. There are actually quite a few works of art made by people 'on the dole'.

No, this is wrong. The people already receiving government checks do so with a stipulation: if you start receiving money from anyone else besides the government, then the government will stop sending checks!

This works to disincentivize people from contributing their time and effort to the economy for fear they will lose the "basic income" that the government provides.

A real basic income is different: the governments says here is a check that should meet all your basic needs and then some and please feel free to do whatever you want with your time, including contributing it to the economy by starting a company, interviewing for a job you actually want, or what have you.

You can live on basic income and/or welfare, but not all that well. You'll be poor. You'll be living in a bad neighborhood or a crummy tiny apartment and won't be able to buy very much.

Most ambitious people -- the people who have personality characteristics that lead them to achieve interesting things -- want more than this. As a result, most are not willing to live exclusively on the dole.

The thing a basic income might accomplish is to allow people to make path changes. As it stands a person's well being is directly tied to their income and very few people make enough or can live debt-free enough to save enough "FU money" to take any length of time off without severely threatening their future (e.g. eating retirement savings). Basic income would allow people to take a step back and reevaluate whether their current path is best.

Welfare is needs-based not wants-based. It doesn't do that.

Personally I think a minimal basic income could go a long way toward eliminating bullshit jobs. A bullshit job is any job that if (hypothetically) eliminated while the person is still paid, nobody would be poorer in any tangible way. It's a job that does not actually need to be done and doesn't actually benefit anyone.

Since our society depends on jobs to move money around, bullshit jobs must continue to exist even when those doing them know they are doing nothing of value. Basic income would allow them to make the intelligent decision to stop doing meaningless and valueless work.

I think the experiment should be done. I'm not sure if it's going to work but there's only one way to find out.

> You'll be poor.

Most people are poor.

> Most ambitious people

Most people are not ambitious.

> Personally I think a minimal basic income could go a long way toward eliminating bullshit jobs

Is that something we really want? I read an article a few months ago about a government program that literally created bullshit jobs for willing, unemployed people to go to so they could keep up their skills.

People who went through the program reported increased feelings of well-being from the conjured-up sense of purpose.

Personally, I'd prefer a bullshit job over no job. Hell, even in a non-bullshit job, there are plenty of things that come with it that are bullshit.

> Personally, I'd prefer a bullshit job over no job.

You realize of course that this runs completely counter to your whinging about supposed freeloaders.

>Most people are poor.

By which definition of poverty?

> Plenty of people already receive checks from the government every month that they live on. Like, a whole lot of people. There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people. Not to belittle them and their abilities, but there isn't.

I'm not well versed in the structure of European welfare systems, but when you look at the US welfare system there are some absolutely perverse incentives that discourage people from working their way out of it. Numerous programs have a sharp income cliff: make more than $x and you no longer get this benefit at all. I have talked to people who have quit a job because they got a promotion and would no longer receive benefits to help pay for the place they were currently renting.

It's bewildering to me that there's no political will on either side to fix this. All it would take is requiring graduated income checks so for every $1 you make more in wages you lose less than $1 of benefits.

So I have some optimism for basic income that if you have a truly inalienable source of income with no strings attached that it'll open up a ton of creativity and value.

> All it would take is requiring graduated income checks so for every $1 you make more in wages you lose less than $1 of benefits.

Or just universal benefits and a progressive income tax, then you don't have to have the bureaucratic machinery of the means tested welfare state.

That doesn't seem an alternative, so much as it seems one potential (particularly smooth) approach.

I meant instead of $1 in $1 off - too much work.

lftl said, "All it would take is requiring graduated income checks so for every $1 you make more in wages you lose less than $1 of benefits."

A progressive income tax (or even a flat tax, really) is a special case of that, with income checks maximally graduated and always stripping your benefits of less than a dollar for every dollar.

There are two reason I'm more interested in just tweaking the current programs rather than UBI (or something similar) and neither of the reasons are that I think the current system is more efficient.

1) In the US at least UBI seems politically unfeasible for the near term at least. The ACA was a massive political battle, and while I don't think it'll be repealed, there's still a decent political groundswell aimed at doing so. This makes it hard to imagine anything like UBI getting done in the US. Graduated cliffs for existing programs seems like a minute tweak in contrast, and I really can't foresee what a legitimate argument against it would be on either side. I'm pretty sure most of the programs could even be changed by executive order to some degree.

2) I think there will always be a paternalistic side to welfare or UBI. With UBI some people will continue to avoid spending their money on decent housing, decent food, and health insurance (assuming there's no universal healthcare as well). And there will always be some pressure for programs to provide these things to people, who have decided they aren't a priority, at taxpayer expense. Hopefully, charities could step into these roles, but welfare gets messy in both directions with some people claiming there's a moral imperative for government to help people in certain situations, and some people angry about "their" money being spent by others on things they find morally objectionable. I don't think those arguments are ever going away.

I'm always a little mystified by those who believe there is some vast pool of people receiving something called "welfare" that pays them munificent sums to sit around all day not working.

There is no "welfare". There's SNAP(food stamps) with a princely average payment of $125, which has time limits on eligibility and mostly goes to working households. There's TANF which only goes to households with children and has both time limits on eligibility and work requirements.

What there absolutely is not is some sort of program where millions of people are paid to sit around think of ways to build a better mousetrap. The idea that there is remains one of those pernicious myths that just won't seem to die.

>What there absolutely is not is some sort of program where millions of people are paid to sit around

https://www.ssa.gov/agency/performance/2016/FINAL_2014_2016_...

Case in point. Social Security is OASDI - old age, survivors, and disability insurance. It's not a guaranteed income for the general population, it's meant to provide support to those incapable of working due to age or disability.

> Plenty of people already receive checks from the government every month that they live on, in exchange for no real work responsibilities. There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people. [...] but there isn't

But that's no surprise -- the reason they're receiving the money in the first place is because they are unable to work in some capacity. It's need-based (old age, disability, etc.). The basic income system would give it to everyone, widening the demographic considerably.

>Just about everything that we consider a real advance comes from people working the system that exists using their own ingenuity, not from people allowed to escape the system by providing them an inalienable source of income.

It's not at all clear that lack of guaranteed income plays a roll in the 'ingenuity' of the working population. In fact, if we look at the extreme examples, founders of highly successful businesses often had significant family income that allowed them to accomplish what they have.

But ... They do.

When I was younger I lived off the (UK) state for a while. I ran political campaigns to protect our right to silence, volunteered nightly at a suicide hotline and worked on clean water projects. Friends of mine produced artwork and installations.

Eventually we all got proper jobs, some making iron-sculptures for a living, some putting on weight in offices. But a lot of productive work was done. Now we were in our early twenties, we would have done something, but I remember my room-mate staggering in from a dead end job and slumping down as I went off to my second "volunteer" job.

It seemed far more acceptable 20 years ago to do this but most humans will do something meaningful with their lives if the next few months rent is sorted out.

It's the worry about where next weeks meals and shelter are coming from that limit most people's horizons, not a in are lack of artistry or passion in their soul.

It all depends on what we as a society value most. At this point, we (most of us) are forced to work/do things that we aren't passionate about (or even interested in) just to earn a very very basic lifestyle. Imagine a huge part of the population doesn't have to worry about it anymore, as opposed to a small percentage of the population on welfare now. People would start valuing other things more like artistic abilities etc. How many artists have gone into fields that they have no interest in, just to earn a living? They might go back to creating art, writing books and so on.

At least, that is my dream :P

Whether this experiment succeeds or not, it is well worth trying. Finland is a very good bet to start this experiment because of it's small size, homogeneous population etc. It would be very difficult to do such an experiment in big, diverse countries like the U.S

Also, past aristocrats. Many (the only?) scientists were aristocrats. But most of them did nothing but, at most, develop byzantine courtly fashion. Basic income will probably yield a similar proportion of doers.

In a wider perspective, life has become easier for humans over the last 15,000 years. Does this mean we are less motivated; or have more energy available for non-immediate needs?

Never mind historic aristocrats, what about the stay-at-home spouses, adult offspring and other working-age dependents of today's moderately well off? What do they do with their time?

It's a pretty pertinent question if we're about to extend financial benefits previously only paid to people at least notionally looking for (or unable to) work to this much larger group of working age people who hitherto haven't signalled that they actually need the money...

> Plenty of people already receive checks from the government every month that they live on, in exchange for no real work responsibilities. Like, a whole lot of people. There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people. Not to belittle them and their abilities, but there isn't.

There's some kind of selection bias there already. I'm not saying those people were not creative, passionate, hard-working to begin with. But many have ended up in that situation after going through things that tend to, well, crush you, for lack of a better word.

You are missing the fact that being poor does not just effect the current generation. The stress induced by living on low income lowers the prospects of the children of these families. Which in turn effects the prospects of the children of the children. The effects of stress are pronounced and greatly effect both quality of life and productivity. Universal income seeks to reduce this stress and give eryone a fairer shot at life. If you think living on benefits is easy you should try it for a couple of months.

I'm not so sure. The people who receive government checks in the US aren't the same people who would be amazing for the economy to have, which is why they're on government checks (they're either on disability or retirement).

Two big points about BI:

1) You seem to be thinking of idealist communism, where everyone gets the same paycheck no matter what they do. BI is not like that. The idea with BI is that you get a basic income for nothing. It's just that: basic. Not luxurious, not even very good. Enough to live in a crappy little apartment with a roommate maybe. The incentive to do better is simple: do you want to live in a crappy apartment with roommates, or do you want something better? If you want more than the basic, then you need to get a job.

2) For the "not-so-huge wave of accomplishment", you're missing something pretty big: crime. All those lower-class people getting checks from the government may not be accomplishing much, but they're generally not committing crimes, and as a result, our crime rates are at historically low levels despite what the sensational news media would have you believe. Now why aren't they accomplishing more? Probably because most more-capable people aren't on welfare, they're gainfully employed. But you're also missing other stuff: a lot of these people getting government checks DO work, they just do it under-the-table. They do odd jobs: home repair, yard work, etc., and get paid in cash so they don't lose their check. The government may not like this, but it does add to the economy, and it shows that BI is a workable concept: these people frequently DO want to work, but for whatever reason, regular full-time employment escapes them, either because there's not enough full-time work available (and part-time doesn't pay the bills because there's no benefits and the minimum wage is too low, so they stick with welfare and under-the-table work), or because they have some physical or mental problems that keep them from holding down a regular job. Whatever the reason, most people really do want to make more money than the bare minimum, you just don't see it because it's cash-based and not reported to the IRS.

That isn't the same as no responsibilities.

> Modern Western societies are rich enough that smart, motivated individuals can mostly rise to the level of their own ability.

Capitalism isn't a meritocracy and hasn't been for some time (if ever).

Basic income (along with other ideas intended to improve the value of human capital) helps level the field so people can focus on things like a better education, etc.

Frankly, I think we need to focus more on providing access to better education (e.g. Free community college, technical schools, bachelor degrees) with reasonable application restrictions (e.g. Fields with low demand such as many Art/soft skill majors should have caps on how many free degrees are available while fields with high demand should be uncapped).

I think that'd get us alot further than basic income would in regards to your criticism.

HOWEVER, basic income isn't primarily about improving human capital...its just one of the reasons:

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/19/5_reasons_to_consider_a_no_s...

1) Reduces poverty

2) Stabilizes aggregate demand since people who are primarily relying on it for income are going to spend it on goods/services for survival.

3) Certain social ills (e.g. Domestic abuse) are reduced as its easier to escape bad situations. Children are more likely to finish high school.

4) It is more efficient in terms of dollars spent than existing programs (except Social Security)

5) Human dignity

A really good example to look at is (apparently) the case of how Arab migrants feel 'included' in Belgium vs. in Canada.

Apparently, in Belgium, the welfare system is targeted towards providing financial incentives to less-fortunate people, awhile the Canadian welfare system is more directed towards 'fulfilling life'. Apparently a lot of immigrants to Belgium migrate to Canada even if they make more 'free' money in Belgium, because of this reason. Tyler Cowen's written a bit about it, and you might need to look it up, but I found it verrry interesting.

Searching "Tyler Cowen Belgium Canada" isn't being helpful. Could you post a link?

I meant Chris Blattman, oops!

Money quote from the link: Here is Verwimp:

Belgium has a very elaborate welfare state. All citizens have health coverage, schools and universities charge no or few fees, child benefits, unemployment benefits, pensions, are all in place. But this comes at a cost of a closed labour market, meaning a labour system that heavily protects those who are in, but makes entry for newcomers very difficult.

It does not seem to be poverty, but exclusion. Philip wrote to me:

One of my students from African origin, graduating from our MA program, told me (before the Paris attacks) « it is easier to get unemployment benefits in Belgium than to get a job ». He decided to move to Canada. That summarises it. Migrants and their families have full access to the allocations of the welfare state, but face daunting challenges when they want to get ahead in life.

…I am not looking at individual factors to join IS, as young adults across European cities many share similar reasons, but for ‘structural’ factors that make the situation different in some countries compared to others.

Here's the link I saw the other day:

https://chrisblattman.com/2015/12/01/this-graph-says-the-wel...

Here's the link (I meant Chris Blattman, not Tyler Cowen. Sorry for misleading, people!):

https://chrisblattman.com/2015/12/01/this-graph-says-the-wel...

The balance is finding the amount of assistance that reaches two points, reducing requesting even more aid and removing the tendency to want to take another persons stuff.

I believe that this is one of those long term deals, it won't be the first generation which learns to live with it but following generations will. By the third it should be entrenched and cultural norms will be that you don't another persons stuff and your needs are met.

As of right now there is too much opportunity to game the system which in itself requires a much more robust system within the government to track all the aid dollars it spends. The danger is that this will force a move away from physical money. This is because it allows government to manipulate the money you have. It leads to totalitarian control as they can simply outlaw an activity by preventing expenditures on it. So in the end the money will need to be independent of the governments as well. (it will be sold to stop terrorists, drug dealers, and other "bad" people)

>> There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people. Not to belittle them and their abilities, but there isn't.

Two thoughts here: 1) What specifically do you mean by "wave of accomplishment"? How should that be measured?

2) You will need to cite some proof of this assertion. I can think of many anecdotes of successful people (J.K. Rowling, for instance) who achieved success while on welfare.

>>Modern Western societies are rich enough that smart, motivated individuals can mostly rise to the level of their own ability.

Not sure this true, but I'd like to see any data you have on this point as well. As it stands, social and economic mobility is limited by birth, see http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/20...

You would have to triple welfare payments in order to test if idle people do great things as currently most people can't live off the paltry payments welfare gives. There's also hoops galore to jump through every month like applying for X amount of jobs and getting the interviewers to vouch you did in order to receive another cheque.

BI means you can afford to live. Welfare gives you a spot on a waiting list to get into a SRO dump full of drug addicts and $100 remainder to eat, buy hygiene products, and transportation for a month. Nobody can live off that so going to loan sharks, doing under the table exploitative labor and daily hustling are needed at least here in Canada.

There are also plenty of children of wealthy families that essentially receive checks from their parents every month that they live on, in exchange for no real work responsibilities.

I would say that there's a fair sized wave of accomplishment coming out of this group. Has Zuckerberg ever had to have a real job?

They are both cherry picked groups, and have vastly different backgrounds that affect their level of productivity. Giving everyone $8,000 per year would have vastly different results for different people. It's hard to say what the net effect would be.

> I'm cautiously enthusiastic about basic income. I want to believe that it really can change everything, until that nagging doubt of "but human nature just doesn't work that way!" inevitably kills the buzz.

I'm the same way. I'm excited that we as a species are testing it out, but I'm also glad that it's not my direct economy it's being tested on. I really hope it's successful, and I think it can be, but it's also quite risky.

> There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people.

Could you clarify which people specifically you're talking about? I'm not trying to disagree with you. It's just that the main examples I'm thinking of are retired folks receiving social security and people with disabilities.

Many people are on physical disability who could still be doing most of the things that basic income is supposed to enable. To the extent that it limits them in some specific ways, if the basic income elevator pitch is correct, one would think that it would make what they can do even more likely to come out.

This is a very interesting point I hadn't thought of, worthy of some thought. (And that's all I'm saying. I haven't had the thought time yet.)

I think this might be part of the issue though - I saw another article about this plan that said people often _don't_ try to contribute because their welfare benefits are subject to them not doing certain things.

For instance - you get $X from welfare, you could make $Y doing some work despite your disability, but $Y < $X, and if you make $Y, the government won't give you $X - therefore there is no reason to pursue $Y.

Even if you don't have money, often if you're on disability anything that might show you aren't "so disabled" can stop it. Therefore even if you want to, there is really a strong reason not to try to do things.

That is what basic income is meant to really alleviate - there becomes no reason not to do other stuff, because it's unconditional - those already on welfare no longer have all those requirements.

I'm not saying it would be perfect, but I do think it would address at least part of this problem. I wish I had an actual study on the numbers of people that don't try to get jobs/be productive while on welfare because of the risk of losing the primary income stream they get from welfare, but I can't find anything. I have known several people in this situation though, and watching the system treat them that way was kind of heartbreaking.

"I saw another article about this plan that said people often _don't_ try to contribute because their welfare benefits are subject to them not doing certain things."

A good point.

But basic income is generally sold as an arts and hobby thing, where they're not going to make any money anyhow. Basic income participants who are going to take the money but not do a "real job" aren't going to go out and dig ditches or something.

Since this isn't a binary thing, we should expect to be able to find an effect if this is going to happen, even if disability isn't evenly distributed and even if certain categories are impaired due to welfare rules. Who's on disability making art or music or something who would otherwise be stuck in a job? Alternatively, show me a work of art or something from the cases of basic income that were tried that couldn't have been done without it.

(We'd really like to see a sufficiently strong pattern before we run this sort of experiment at scale, and we'd really like it to be somehow some appreciated work, but I'll start with asking just for one instance.)

If doing a little of this sort of thing does not produce a little of the desired result at this scale, there is no rational reason to believe that doing more is going to produce the desired result either. (Italicized words very important. It could indeed be the case that doing more would in fact produce the desired result, but there's no data to lead you to that belief rationally.) The rational belief becomes to discard the idea that basic income is going to be used for arts and music and stuff, because we can stop speculating about what people do under those circumstances and just look.

Because if basic income really is paying people to do nothing, it won't work at scale. We can't afford to pay everybody to do nothing. The economics would simply adjust such that the basic income is not a livable wage anymore via inflation mechanisms. (Which is basically one of my great fears; basic income combined with voting creates a one-way ratchet, and so far, I've heard no mechanism to even slow down the ratchet, let alone reverse it.)

That's a lot of people, and they shouldn't be left out of the discussion. Retired people and the disabled accomplish a lot of things. It's just that these are personal accomplishments.

Paying someone to not have to participate in the economic system, seems to me to force them to forever remain outside of it, unless they have a rare kind of motivation, that kind of motivation would mean they didn't need the basic income to succeed in the first place.

People still like to have more money. A job might well look more attractive if your basic needs are already covered and so you can afford to only work part time, for example. And it will certainly look more attractive if there's no monetary threshold you can cross that will yank your government benefits.

I'm not opposed to basic income, and I do agree that the dynamics you're presenting might actually happen, in some cases for some people.

I think though, that it's going to wind up being Just Another Government Program, if it were to be implemented in the US.

There's just not enough money around to give everyone an income of more than maybe a thousand dollars a month. You'd need to really change how government finance works in order to be more generous.

I don't understand what you mean by "wind up being Just Another Government Program."

$1,000/month seems like a highly reasonable amount. It's more than Finland is proposing.

I may have been too generous. By an order of magnitude.

The US has 320 million people living in it. $1000/month * 320 million is $3.8 trillion/year.

That, weirdly enough, is the size of the entire US budget for 2016.

http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-republicans-pass-3-8-trill...

You'd want to look at state budgets too, since a lot of social programs happen there. Basic income is supposed to replace social security, unemployment, food stamps, and more. That's not a huge change to the number, but it's decent.

There's no doubt taxes would need to increase to fund such a program, of course.

> There's no doubt taxes would need to increase to fund such a program, of course.

Who would pay them?

Workers? It's not like everybody would stop working. The number of people content with $1,000/month is going to be pretty low.

I fail to see how that could possibly fly, politically. Everybody who works has to pay for everybody who doesn't want to work to just fuck around.

It's not qualitatively different than what we have now.

Also, everyone gets the checks. Some workers' parents will be living off them. Their kids in college. Their cousin who was crippled in a car wreck. It's not like they won't know people benefiting who aren't exactly lazy freeloaders.

The magnitude is different, and you shouldn't be ignorant to that detail.

Doesn't answer the question. Politics doesn't truck to reason.

I never said anyone should be left out of the discussion. I didn't even disagree with you (as I explicitly said). But I do think your position is vastly more complex to defend if these are the only two sample sets you have to base it on.

Part of the problem with things like disability pay is that it introduces a complex calculus about whether it's worth it to keep getting it or not. A basic income is designed to alleviate that. There are many situations where someone on disability is presently encouraged by the system to not be overly productive (even if they could be or might like to be).

"Paying someone to not have to participate in the economic system"

No, again, basic income is about the government providing an income to meet basic needs without any strings attached. The government isn't paying you not to participate, they are saying you may participate and how much is up to you without fear of starving.

I disagree with your second part. A good counter example is that if I had a basic income, I'd be much more likely to pursue a career in scientific research, particularly in the area of Marine Biology. I love software development but I also love biology. The big choice for me is that software pays very well and makes it much easier to support a family which is also important to me. Given an opportunity to have a baseline to supplement my income, I'd be vastly more likely to choice a career that allowed me to not only do right by my family but had a net positive impact on the world as a whole.

Devil's advocate. Doesn't that mean that you would stop doing something that people value and start doing something people don't value as much? I'm for BI but this makes it sound like you would do something that people don't want and that you might be worse at doing than your current job.

I don't think so, I'd say a different sort of people value the current work I do. People who are interested in making money over other pursuits. The people who really care about ecology/biology and advancing human knowledge there would put making money as second to the science. Therefore they tend to not have as much money. It's less about the volume of people that value something and more about the kind of people that value something IMO.

I think an important step is to identify the critical pieces of work that need to occur in order to maintain whatever standard of living a basic income is expected to provide. Then, you need to somehow ensure that the work that is needed to be done is actually done.

Awful example. People can't barely get by with those govt checks (at least in the US).

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