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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

> We should do away with it and replace it with basic income

So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.

We, as a society, are very good at band-aid solutions (like minimum wage from the get-go). We're not good at solving the real hard problems. The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too.

This dwells into the highly debated economics of a BI economy, however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI. Rather, we need that workforce to evolve into higher level jobs, but this requires even more education and/or highly skilled job training.

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There simply aren't enough jobs to go around and automation is wiping out entire career tracks faster than they could possibly be replaced. Example: in the area I grew up in if you weren't headed off to college and didn't want to join the military you always had the option of working on a pulp wood crew. The work was back-breaking, the pay wasn't great, but you could get by and turnover was so high that if you stuck it out for a few years you'd end up running your own crew. Fast forward a couple decades and the work of 60 men with chainsaws, trucks, and manning equipment at the lumber yard has been replaced by three or four heavy equipment operators, a truck driver, and a couple of engineers at the sawmill that monitor the line for faults. That's work that isn't coming back and nothing new has popped up to replace it.

> The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too.

Or there are aren't enough jobs? What are you going to do? Will good jobs into existence? That's not going to happen.

> however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI.

Completely wrong. We already harvest enough food to feed everyone. We're well on our way to 100% clean, renewable energy. We're already well on our way to self-driving electric cars. The rest? We're on our way to automating that as well (doctors and lawyers first, the most expensive skillsets, and then quickly down from there).

Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting. I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value.

> Or there are aren't enough jobs?

That's the thing about higher education and/or highly skilled training. It enables the creation of more jobs. (A job can be self-employed).

And to that end, we have jobs, plenty... but we don't have folks willing (or qualified) to fill them. This is inside the "bubble", but there's very few software companies that are not constantly hiring. We simply don't have enough qualified engineers to fill all the available seats. I'll concede that there are certainly fields where jobs are disappearing, and as you hinted, this is part of the "new economy". We need these folks (and our young generation) to gain new skills that are more useful in this new economy. Sure, many things will become automated, but we need folks to create the automation. (and no, I don't believe doctors nor lawyers will ever fully be automated, as these are not just knowledge/task-based skillsets).

> I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value

This is not how an economy runs. The government can't print money to hand out, so it must come from someplace. This someplace is taxes, paid for by the workforce in majority (payroll tax + income tax equal about 80% of federal revenue[1]). If this workforce shrinks, so does federal revenue, which means not enough funds to support a BI long term (this is part of the reason a BI has never been implemented, even though it's a very old idea. We have to wait and see how it works out for the volunteer test nation in the long term...).

> Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting

This goes back to my earlier point. We need fewer low skilled laborers, instead replaced with more highly skilled laborers. We need folks to design and implement the robots that will eventually build all these other things. We'll always have a human workforce - but the landscape of "work" is indeed changing.

[1] http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-federal-...

> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.

No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables.

Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.

Why do they love to go to school? To learn? No - they can do that with the Internet today. They want a higher paying job, nothing else.

> No, you give them money to pay rent and eat

If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage).

Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today.

Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).

> Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.

We do have programs in place that solve this. Yes, you have to pay it back, and it can certainly add up to a large sum if you decide to not work at all and use your loan to pay for food and rent. Perhaps our universities should change the paradigm, and require students to work at minimum part time, as this yields a tremendous amount more than just money... but I digress.

> Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).

If implemented by idiots, I agree basic income would tend to result in the consequences you describe [1]. It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time. If a person is currently working a job which pays them $1500 / month, then ideally basic income would result in (assuming that we agree on $1000 / month as the minimum subsistence-level income) that same person making $500 / month at the same job, and receiving $1000 / month in basic income.

So to be clear, anyone currently getting a wage exceeding the agreed-upon basic income level, should not see much difference in how much they take home each month.

Properly done, the only price inflation you should see are from people who are seeing more money each month than they were before, because they were previously working at below-subsistence wages. But even then, they were probably receiving other government assistance anyway, and with basic income we'd start phasing that stuff out as well.

[1] Which, I admit, means it stands a good chance of happening that way. Difficulty of proper implementation is an argument against basic income, but it is also reflective of our broken, irresponsible government.

You make good points.

I don't necessarily oppose BI, but I am very skeptical of it actually working in practice for any nation. We'll have to wait and see how Finland's experiment works in the long term, but also we should recognize Finland is a small nation (5.3 million population, or about 45% of NYC's population) without a major economy like the US. The successes of one small nation don't necessarily translate into successes for large nations.

> It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time.

I would argue, and you touched on, that we would have to do more than just drop minimum wage. We'd have to do away with all forms of social welfare safety nets.

There is a good argument that government would actually save money annually by shifting all forms of social welfare into a BI, due to reduced overhead of management, number of concurrent (and sometimes redundant) programs, folks who abuse/scam the system, etc. With a BI, that would be it, nobody gets any more or less, and you're free to spend it how you see fit.

> the only price inflation you should see

I'm not an economist, however I do believe some inflation is natural. This would mean, that over time, BI would have to be increased, just like our current-day minimum wage program. If we can somehow generate a self-sustaining feedback loop on a BI economy, maybe that works.

The best thing I can see about a BI system that replaced the myriad of welfare programs we have now is that it (if implemented correctly) would remove a lot of the perverse incentives that keep people at the edge in dependent situations. Anecdata, but I've known people that turned down work or dropped out of the workforce because the extra income would be enough to put their households over the top of certain income "cliffs" that are built into some of the crappy welfare systems they took advantage of - a small bit of extra money wasn't worth crossing that Rubicon of whatever multiple of the poverty line, and losing their heating assistance, or free healthcare, and whatnot.

The real meta problem is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Who cares if they have a job or they just sit at home and play videogames.

Basic Income would allow people the freedom to pursue the things that truly interest them. It will be a golden era of video games and movies and art. A huge percentage of the population will be only concerned with pleasure.

Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. It's not just factory workers and cashiers either. Many white collar tasks, bookkeeping, simple accounting, simple contracts, simple law are being swallowed by automation too.

I see a future where everyone is in a play or a movie, making a game, working on a novel, reading a metric ton of fan-fiction.

What's probably true is alot more porn, video games and arguing on Reddit about porn and video games.

Either way, it's better than millions doing jobs they hate, badly as they watch automation swallow them up like an ocean does an exhausted overboard sailor.

> Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that.

I recently visited a reconstruction medieval village museum on the outskirts of Berlin. It's almost unimaginable how labor-intensive simple subsistence was for our ancestors. Try running a scratch-plow behind a team of oxen, reaping wheat with a sickle, grinding flour with a quern, spinning wool into yarn by hand with a spindle, weaving that yarn into cloth on a hand-loom, chopping hazel whips with a hatchet, splitting them into withs, and weaving a basket.

Now I can walk into Walmart, and grab a loaf of bread, a five-pack of t-shirts, and a Rubbermaid storage tub for less than an hour's worth of labor.

Where would the money for Basic Income come from?

> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.

It solves the issue with minimum wage pointed out by jayess, at least. Employers would be able to hire people for whatever wage they like, even pennies a day if they wanted to (or financials forced them to). Meanwhile, the people working for very low wages or unable to find work at all, would be guaranteed enough to live on regardless.

That seems to be a goal of economic policy these days. I don't see anyone arguing that we must - by dint of constrained resources - simply have some people live below the subsistence level (which is another way of saying we must leave some people to die). If that is your position then please show us that we don't have the resources we need to keep our current population alive.

Because otherwise, one way or another, we ought to be providing people with food and housing - simply for existing. We've tried government housing and food stamps and soup kitchens: government housing is a disaster, food stamps seem nearly equivalent to giving people cash anyway, and soup kitchens probably can't scale. We've tried minimum wage and that did mostly work while the supply (and type) of labor matched the supply (and type) of jobs available, but it's not clear that will be the case going forward. And, even if it is the case going forward, basic income might still work better, anyway.

I'm all for educating people, or training them, etc. However it is a fact that some people will fall through the cracks, and it is a fact that not everyone can be trained or educated into a vocation that society actually needs people for. For these cases basic income seems like the most efficient means of keeping them alive, fed, and sheltered. I am open to other solutions.

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