YC set to launch one-year minimum income pilot project to figure out logistics
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Along with the daily fish, does it makes sense to provide some sort of vocational training that an otherwise healthy person can take advantage of?
If a person was not able to take advantage of early education for whatever reason, but is currently physically healthy, there is still opportunity to provide for himself and his family by learning some vocational skills.
Choosing Oakland in particular has interesting connotations, considering that it is a major industrial center where there may be lots of opportunity for skilled workers.
Maybe even a reversal of the automation movement in favor of using basic labor for many repetitive tasks in order to achieve this altruistic goal.
Of course, there are still a great many people who truly could take advantage of the basic income experiment because their other options are severely limited for whatever reason.
Because that's really what we want in the 21st century: human machine cogs like we had in the 19th. No, let's let robots do robot things and we don't need humans to "compete" with them. Let's let humans do more human (and humane) oriented tasks.
The definition of "humane" keeps shifting over time and will always be a matter of perspective.
To share a personal story, my father was unemployed while I was in college. Within a few months he looked like he had aged 10 years. Several months later he took a part time job as a landscaper and he started recovering.
I remember coming home from college once, driving to his work site and watching him push a lawnmower until he had a break in his work. This was a man that used to wear a suit and tie and commute to the city every day. Yet as I watched him push a lawnmower, I never felt more proud of him. He introduced me to his co-workers and it was the first time I had seen him smile in nearly a year. Several months later he was able to find gainful employment.
One could argue the isolation and lethargy caused by long term unemployment is more damaging mentally and physically than most labor intensive jobs. Moreover, society needs rungs in the ladder of economic advancement and it is human nature to find value in work and being part of a team.
His point was that having any job will create enough benefits to offset the supposed harms caused by having a job that one would consider himself overqualified for.
I've done loads of 'menial' jobs throughout my life and some were so soul-crushingly terrible (to me) that I'm not sure having them was better than 'sitting at home unemployed'.
I've never done landscaping, but I suspect it would not have been one of those soul-crushing jobs.
Take away the need to invest time and energy into basic survival and you can suddenly take advantage of a lot of cool things that were previously not accessible to you.
The intersection of Jobs-That-Can-Work-With-That-Schedule and Jobs-That-Can-Pay-Enough-For-CC-AND-Food-AND-Shelter is tiny and flooded with existing students.
With the strains of poverty, health issues increase. Sometimes this could lead to involvement via social services. At this point, education is a pipe dream.
I've been there. Still am there. I could spend the evening reading educational books. Sometimes I do but always at the expense of what needs to be done. Always st the expense of the little family time I have (I see my kids perhaps one hour tops weekdays - that is a luxury compared to what I used to have).
This is with a system where the state, currently begrudgingly, helps me out a great deal. I whince thinking about countries where the social security net isn't as helpful.
It requires a lot of optimism to keep yourself a float in a situation like this. College, through my eyes, is a wonderful idea that is a bit too on the optimistic side at the moment, even for me.
The short form is that they've solved Friendliness and handed most of the management over to hyperintelligent, near-omnipotent benevolent AIs. The only real problems left for individuals qualify as "how to not get bored", which for the most part they approach by cultivating eye-watering arrays of esoteric and satisfying hobbies, projects, arts and crafts, high-brow debates, luxurious indulgences, social groups, and games. The few people that still aren't satisfied generally end up in their diplomatic corps slash military slash spy agency slash police force. "Ultimate" may have been an exaggeration, but it is by far the most satisfying utopia I've seen described.
Humans enjoy their bodies. We play sports because it's fun and feels good. We enjoy the burn of a good run. We like to look in the mirror and see something vaguely attractive. We like to fuck. And we want to fuck people we find attractive.
Wall-E got it totally wrong.
Please excuse the low effort comment, but I've seen far more people who treat their body terribly, and who become overweight/obese compared to the number of people who do anything close to keeping in shape with sports, running, and so on. Not that that stops people from fucking, but the proportion of athletic, attractive people fucking is far lower than you might make it out to be.
Research has shown that a lack of "psychological bandwidth" degrades impulse control.
Being excessively poor, having to take care of children or elderly parents, having a crappy job, etc. all take their toll on your ability to execute on things like exercise, cleaning, saving, etc.
Removing the problem of "daily living expenses" from someone's plate is a HUGE step toward helping them improve their situation both physically and mentally.
Removing stresses on time, money, social interaction, culture, and mortality will make the population more healthy, not less healthy.
I don't think the Wall-E scenario is entirely off base.
More accurately: there is a higher concentration of overweight people at a store that caters to lower income brackets.
When machines do everything, people won't have to settle for cheap unhealthy foods.
Wall-E represents a utopia of plenty for everyone.
Those are not comparable.
Flat wrong, unless you convince the owners of capital that that's the most prudent investment.
It's already extremely difficult to get hired as a research scientist, even with a big-name PhD.
Which is actually what is happening, and has been happening for the last 2 decades with the entry of a large number of physics, math, and CS Ph.Ds into hedge funds and tech entrepreneurship. Stage 1 is a massive wealth transfer from dumb old money built on relationships to smart new money built on technology. Stage 2 is increased funding for STEM research & applications, as the new money diverts capital into their interests. Stage 2 takes a generation or so - it doesn't happen until the new money feels secure enough in their wealth that they can divert attention to becoming powerful. But we've seen the beginnings of it already, with Tesla, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Calico, Google X, YC Research, Breakthrough Starshot, and the Gates Foundation diverting some of that money that was redirected into scientifically-trained hands back to actual scientists.
That would be horrific, doing "work for works sake" knowing that the only reason you are doing it instead of a machine is because someone decided you needed the nobleness of having a 'job'.
We automate many things to squeeze the absolute last penny out of it. That can have deleterious effects, too.
For example, many fruits and vegetables have been bred to be harvested by machine. These foods have been shown to have fewer nutrients and taste differently from those which much be harvested by hand.
Employing some people to harvest some of the non-automatable crops would be a good thing.
There are a lot of low-paying jobs here that involve doing little else than basic customer service: answering questions and directing people where to go. Similarly, there are also a lot of low-skill labor jobs focused on parts of the national infrastructure.
Imagine, in the United States, if we pulled a page out of FDRs playbook and started putting the underemployed to work on our national infrastructure. Helping out road crews, cleaning up parks, cleaning up trash, that sort of thing
Government offices are part of that infrastructure, so people could also learn to answer phones, guide citizens through navigating the maze that is most civil service agencies, and so on.
It would take a lot of work to get there, but all that money goes right back into the economy, and it makes life better for their entire community, which I think should at least be a point of pride.
The two things have little to do with each other.
A universal basic income has two primary purposes. The first is that it can act as the safety net for people with no other options, without the administrative overhead and errors inherent in means testing or the disincentive to work of welfare benefits you lose when you get a job. The second is that it's inherently redistributive across the whole wealth spectrum, so it allows you to simplify the tax system because you're doing the redistributive part on the spending side, allowing you to use a single universal tax rate that can't be avoided with shell games and accounting tricks.
Now you want to offer vocational training on top of that, but this is the usual "we should help people by giving them food stamps" fallacy. Give people the money instead. They know more about their own situation than you do. If their best option is to use the money to go to school, they'll do that. But maybe their better option is to use the money to move somewhere else, or pay down debts, or go to rehab, etc.
The people know better than the government what the people need.
When you see folks saying these people are lazy, they are folks who understand there are always "other options". They might not be the options you want, but then you want free money so who cares what you want.
Meanwhile, providing vocational training is a great thing.
Tying them together assumes you're a better judge of someone's needs when you don't know them. They may have a smarter way to spend or invest the money.
It's hard to learn and work on improving yourself when you have no time or energy left from being able to just pay the bills to eat, sleep and work.
Poverty really is a cycle that more people should try out to see how quickly all of their options, rights, and entitlements dissapear and become inaccesible and traded for constant struggle.
The idea of universal basic income is to eliminate social services bureaucracy - basically that the money spent deciding who is or isn't deserving could be better allocated by just giving something to everyone.
This is comment is a hilarious embodiment of the hipster movement.
That's the point of this project.
As it's his/her right.
I suspect that an important subset of the people that worry about what the unwashed masses are going to do with so many free time, is also a subset of the people that complain about paternalistic states. Kind of ironic.
Then again if I know it will come to an end in xx years, I will feel more inclined to work harder. It's like a deadline.
And the same criticism could be levelled at a 5 year experiment. I think that eventually they're going to have to do a lifelong experiment, buying annuities from a reputable insurance company for the recipients. That's going to be expensive, so make sure you have the experiment set up right before you do it.
If the income stream could just stop at any time, you couldn't measure its psychological impact as effectively.
I have several acquaintances who work in the trades (carpentry, house framing, fence building, concrete driveways/sidewalks/porches building, window/door installers, painters, etc.).
Buying and rehabbing real estate over the past several years, I've met a lot of these folks.
Most of their ability to earn a living wage has been decimated by unchecked immigration.
So I suggest we start there -- give all the tradespeople in our area, who were born here and have now seen their livelihoods decimated -- a living wage.
That way, we can tell them "yes we've fully endorsed unchecked migration, and your jobs are gone, but here -- have this living wage."
What a nice gesture on the part of we the elite!
Look in the mirror.
If you're rehabbing properties in this area (Silicon Valley) you cannot give work to people unless they have a Contractor's license, which you can verify here:
There are many reasons for only hiring licensed contractors:
1) your homeowners or commercial insurance will not be able to 'weasel out' of covering a loss if the contractor has an in-effect license (who got injured or who caused injury or any type of loss, really)
2) you can check their fixed address so that if you need to serve them (for small claims, or a lawsuit, etc.) -- you know you can find them
3) no language barrier, so it's possible to 100% eliminate any possible misunderstanding of the outcome that the hired work needs to achieve
In 2005 a buddy of mine hired a presumptive illegal from the Home Depot parking lot. I alerted my friend "not sure if you've seen this yet, but the guy is using a hand saw to cut and hang your sheetrock"
Anyone dumb enough to hire an illegal probably deserves a guy who cuts and hangs sheetrock with a hand saw
Mein gott.
There was recently a case where the local government had contracted for all the electric and cabling for a new hospital - and it turned out that after calculating the expected pay due to the hours in the offer, there wasn't any money left for the actual cables and electronics the company was supposed to install (also included in the offer). Usually this is all accompanied by fake work contracts that lists higher wages than what's actually paid to the workers.
So your line of:
> Actually, I cannot possibly 'take advantage' of illegal labor -- maybe the people who I hire to do the work do that.
reads a lot like "I do take advantage, but I'm wilfully ignorant, so I'm not the bad guy". Not saying that's the case, just saying that's the impression you give.
I would imagine that a lot of people don't realize the risk they take hiring an unlicensed contractor. So the law-abiding tradespeople lose work to that.
You cannot risk hiring unlicensed tradespeople unless you're just really, really stupid. The "loss of insurance" risk alone is bad enough.
You score it with a knife and snap it for long straight cuts.
You use a hand saw for complicated or non-straight cuts. Or you might use a small rotary power tool but it really doesn't make any difference.
You ask me that after I said:
"Anyone dumb enough to hire an illegal probably deserves a guy who cuts and hangs sheetrock with a hand saw"
I think the point you missed was "he's insinuating using a hand saw is not the correct way, that's why he said Anyone dumb enough to hire an illegal probably deserves a guy who cuts and hangs sheetrock with a hand saw"
"Hey, we're doing a study where we give money to a bunch of people... Not you, though."
Ha!
If recipients are living in public housing, collecting food stamps, accepting federal student loans, or any other form of indirect government aid, then it skews the results.
For example, an important question is if the implementation would require disbanding Obamacare, reverting to the old system, etc. The ability to obtain healthcare can sway a lot of outcomes. I might have pursued a more entrepreneurial path in the past if I had an option of basic income in addition to healthcare.
Same with drug consumption. I would question any "higher drug use" measure as selection bias -- investment bankers aren't generally being drug tested are they? That doesn't mean the overwhelming majority are not eager to earn a productive living.
I think it would be great to drug test for it (but damn expensive and not very libertarian). I bet you'd see a lot of well off people not opting for the free income because they "don't need it" whereas they'd line up for it without a drug test.
The notion that we should drug test welfare recipients is just an outgrowth of condescending Calvinist morality.
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
https://www.nber.org/chapters/c11165.pdf
Why not just spend 2 minutes googling like I did before posting ?
http://www.saprp.org/pm_keyResFind.cfm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/21/house...
I don't know why we are discussing drug tests for welfare, but simple arithmetic provides a very low bar for them to be cost effective. Google suggests a drug test costs $10-30. If welfare costs $15,000/year, then you only need to have a 0.2% positive rate for it to be worth it.
Do you think folks on welfare do drugs at a rate lower than 0.2%?
Yes, it's disputed. Assuming that you/the GP are correct, and that data do exist that people on welfare have reduced "work effort" (how is that measured?), increased fertility, and increased drug consumption, then you of all people know that correlation doesn't mean causation. It could be that their increased fertility and/or drug consumption caused them to go on to welfare. Or vice versa.
Either way, it would be very hard to draw any conclusions from such data outside of correlation.
In addition to confounding, you also run into lots of statistical biases in such data. As someone else pointed out, poor people are screened for drugs at much higher rates than non-poor, because the jobs that poor people work in are much more likely to require them. As such, even if such data exists, it would be very suspect.
Furthermore, drug testing the general population, even one that has marginally higher drug use rates (and I've seen no convincing data of this either way) runs into the problem of predictive value and false positives (for the same reason screening the general female population under 40 for breast cancer results in massively high rates of false positives).
What do you mean 'worth it'? Do you think that the benefits to society of giving someone $15k/yr in welfare are $0?
If so, why not argue for just abolishing social welfare programs altogether--you can even save yourself the cost of all those drug tests!
If not, why do you think society should forgo those benefits because the recipient failed a drug test?
One way to pay out less is to create a barrier such as drug testing. according to the math, drug testing is "worth it" to that end. Its also fairly politically acceptable compared other more extreme examples such as lowering the welfare amount, random denials or killing poor people.
Naturally, I'm not in favor of any of those options.
Consider their headline number - Missouri. Testing cost $336k and found 48 drug users. Assuming welfare costs $10k/person, it saved $480k making it a net positive. All the other states they discuss had significantly higher returns (5-10x).
This all assumes not a single drug user was deterred from applying and also that not a single welfare recipient was deterred from using drugs.
Further, none of these measure the question of whether poor people do more or less drugs. Most of these programs only drug test some people and have expensive human-administered programs to decide who to test: "complete a written questionnaire about drug use" “suspicion-based drug testing for each applicant”, “reasonable suspicion exists” that they might be illegally using “a controlled substance or controlled substance analog.”
The fact that these programs found very few drug users is merely due to the fact that welfare recipients aren't dumb enough to put "yes I do drugs" on a written test.
This article is pulling the social sciences shuffle - find a socially undesirable conclusion, write an abstract hinting that it's false, and bury the truth in the data tables.
Nevertheless, these results are really astonishing and I think you're looking at them all wrong. Some bureaucrat in Utah thought that 460 welfare recipients were suspicious and ordered them tested, but only 18 of them tested positive. The bureaucrat was wrong 96% of the time, and the 4% usage rate is both under the drug use rate for the general population of that state (6% self-reported) and over-represented (because these were the 10% specifically selected people that the agency thought were using drugs).
Anyway, your profit and loss analysis seems fishy to me. It is highly unlikely that by denying 14 applicants their welfare checks the state of Utah saved anything near 100% of the face value of said check. In fact I would say it is quite likely that the state paid some fraction (with no upper bound) of that on subsequent support for and/or enforcement upon the unsupported people and their families, not to mention the general economic loss of not putting that money in motion.
not to mention the general economic loss of not putting that money in motion.
Can you explain what this means? Sometimes I hear language like this describing Keynesian stimulus, but you do know we aren't in a recession, right? We don't have any slack labor force that can be tricked into working by reducing their real wages while holding nominal wages fixed.
Point is it could be the wrong direction. We don't really know yet how it should be implemented. Experiments like this are what is going to tell us.
"Welfare" is in the US Constitution.
What I'm really curious to personally answer is: what would happen if everybody would be guaranteed a basic income? What kind of problems would it introduce? Would the new minimum income become a poor tool because of corresponding price increases (to capture that income)? Or would it work well long term?
That's why I'd love to see a small country. Preferably not Switzerland or Nordic. Because they've been able to create programs that others have a hard time replicating. A country with a more mixed population (religions, races, education levels).
If only there were a group of people with sufficient money they never had to work! We could study them and see what they did to amuse themselves.
Depending on how much money it is, the extra income might disqualify them from receiving most of that stuff anyway, especially if they also have any kind of a job.
That's going to be the real thing to watch out for though. If the basic income isn't enough to disqualify you from welfare but basic income + job is, the study is going to be useless unless you prohibit the subjects from also applying for welfare.
One elegant way to ensure that people don't use these benefits, and that doesn't leave them worse off, is to make minimum income higher than all of the income eligibility limits.
This is a good example of how some programs work that could conflict with the experiment: http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/income-rules-income-limits
That's a tad disingenuous. I'm sure "anymore" might clarify it, but it's easy to say when you are rich.
It just seemed silly language to me, especially in light of the program focusing on how money can alleviate the majority of poverty's struggles.
Nor should the income be withdrawn as a form of punishment. If we start picking and choosing then the incentive is always to cut away the least powerful, disenfranchised criminals being the least powerful of all.
Not too terribly far off from this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure
Robots that don't need humans is science fiction for the foreseeable future. They are not producing output from nothing; they are just tools that amplify the productivity of human workers.
This has been happening for hundreds of years with new technologies that improve efficiency.
Tell that to the thousands of people who have lost their jobs on assembly floors.
In fact, BI is a hedge against the future where there simply won't be enough for all of us to do.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-wi...
http://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/04/rise-machines-future-l...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/what-happens-when-rob...
...and so on.
There are so many problems that need solving. I don't think we are anywhere close to a world where there is not enough for people to work on. There is currently a mismatch between the skills needed and the skills available, but we should try to solve that problem first rather than giving up and saying that some people just cannot contribute anything.
>Do only certain people qualify for basic income?
The good part about it is that everyone qualifies for the exact same payment, this reduces the cost of administering the program significantly. No need to fill out forms, check if you are covered, prove you make under a certain amount, or talk to 20 different agencies, the only thing that has to be confirmed is that you are a legal resident.
But no, every citizen qualifies. That's the basic part.
Basic is the "only enough to subsist on" part.
If rent's high, you have less flexibility to make lifestyle changes since you need to work more hours / jobs just to pay rent (making it hard to take classes), invest in things which will save money over the long term, or do things like move closer to work/school to save time.
But in the absence of that, as scientific experiments go, and dressing it up as such is a waste of money. I'm sure enough people have told them that by now. YCR says it's for figuring out the logistics, which implies some kind of future action. The only problem is if they wanted to do this correctly, this isn't going to be very useful way of figuring out the logistics for eg. people who speak Swahili. See my comment here for more info on why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812563
I would love to be wrong but I doubt it. The study will no doubt make for interesting reading - if it's published.
There is one other way - Expansion of the overall money supply. But this is well-known to result in nearly equivalent inflation. Humans somehow want a certain percentage of all money - not just an arbitrary amount. This percentage may be extremely small for some - 0.0000001% of all money, or less - but when the total number of dollars increases, each person wants an equivalent percentage increase in the total number of dollars they get. This may be Bitcoin or ISK or priceless paintings instead of dollars, or whichever currency of the day.
Has there been a UBI monetary-policy model produced that doesn't invoke large inflation or heavy wealth redistribution?
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/eby/apa?query=oakland&ma...
overall the experiment is "slightly different" than giving the poor yearly tax refunds (ex: it gives money to the rich and the poor) so...maybe useful :)
One line I didn't like from the article:
It’s obviously difficult to lift people out of poverty. According to the White House, as of 2012 (decades after President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty"), approximately 15 percent of Americans (or 49.7 million people, including 13.4 million children) live below the poverty line. Worse still, "only about half of low-income Americans make it out of the lowest income distribution quintile over a 20-year period." (As the old saying goes: "It’s expensive to be poor.")
I think this can be very misleading. Is the poverty line a good definition? And if everyone's standard of living rises over 20 years, is it an issue to be in the bottom quintile? I'm not saying it is or isn't, just that it's very shabby statistics. (Maybe I just shouldn't read articles like this)
I was just wondering if she did lot of research on the topic that made her the most suitable candidate for the job.
Today "lowest tier housing" is purchased by the poor/poorest class. Suddenly the poor (and everybody, for that matter) have more money, however the amount of housing remains the same (though I guess some new development could be spurred, but you get the drift).
Really the YC experiment won't be able to even touch this aspect. It also won't be able to really touch on the long term effects it would have on participants. Initially will people be like "yea! let's get more education!" but then after 10 or 20 years, it just becomes common place, people stop thinking of it as "extra money for growth" but as "just normal monthly spending money" (like they consider food stamps today or what not) what happens then, I wonder...do they just live in slightly nicer apartments, or use it for education? It will be an interesting experiment for sure...
All I know is the people who live next to me really wish they could afford cable TV. And trips to disneyland. This would make their dreams come true...(there's a reason they're currently poor, believe it or not, it's something like cultural background and current cultural peer group, and kind of their understanding of how the world works). Extra money might not help that particular group. Though it would take the stress/pressure off, certainly. Or maybe it would, I don't know. So in essence, it might "magnify" peoples' current propensities. Do they want to not work? Don't! Do they want to invest? You can invest more quickly (though the reality, like I said before, is people tend to just "spend up" to what they think they can afford, get nicer cars, etc. again if this experiment is "only 5 years" they may not see this). It also makes me wonder if employers will offer "less" since they know "well, you already make 10K so I guess we don't have to offer you as much..." :|
However, if I receives this money <cough> of course I would do magnanimous things with it, like...investing it in real estate. Especially since poor people have more money to pay landlords. I wouldn't feel bad about jacking the rents on them now that I know they can afford it :)
So the reality is that people who now "wish" they could go to college will be able to (huge win, BTW). And those happy with not working? Well, they won't have to (or do they already not?) Got a cruddy job you wish you could quit? You will be able to (so maybe wages for worse jobs will increase?) The question mark is what will happen after that. Will people who quit their "tedious job" start up a new business out of sheer boredom/sheer freedom? Or will they just not work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
The Hawthorne effect can apply if they tell the group receiving the money about the expected benefits of basic income. They know the spotlight is on them. They're also getting special treatment. They might work more and do better in this situation than if basic income was the norm similar to how welfare is the norm but doesn't get people out of poverty. Whereas, it's the opposite if the control group is told about the scheme: people in an economic rut with likely negative outlook that just got slighted on basic income and will be watched to see if they will fail. They'll likely fail either by default or barely trying although some might be motivated to work harder to stick it to observers.
If Y Combinator is reading this, I suggest countering it with careful presentation to each party. Especially to the control group. Tell them they're simply being observed as part of a study on poverty in Oakland and where people end up over time. Absolutely no talk of basic income or another group.
For benefiting group, countering Hawthorne effect is less my expertise. Old trick of making both groups feel like they're getting special treatment or advantage can't apply here. Perhaps water down the effect by describing it as one of a series of experiments... with descriptions of various approaches... to help lift people out of poverty along with theory of each. Mention positive, neutral, and negative outcomes that are common on existing welfare. Mention the potential the new approach offers. Mention that they're selected to try it for a year with the results entirely on them but observed to inform future studies. Effect is still there but with a balanced presentation instead of overly-positive or specific push from researchers presenting it. Information overload might even drown out Hawthorne effect to make them focus on whatever is last thing said.
The control group I'm pretty sure on but other possibilities are speculation. Consider how to handle benefit group carefully. Regardless of methodology, I'm glad to see YC doing it as it might help some people regardless.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Annual_i...
I questioned the value of doing this when something like public healthcare is working very well in Canada, where it operates much more cost effectively than the US public/private mess, and it has been for a long long time. And we're right next to the US. Yet there has been little progress adopting a similar system in the US.
I'm not sure if just getting examples of it working will be a sufficient motivator that they hope it will be. But I guess public healthcare is old hat now and not in need of scientific study for it's efficacy, just political will which is much more expensive and involved than running social experiments.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income
I had a similar initial question, since I heard once that Germans (?) already have a basic income system in place, though possibly only for the poor ($500/month plus housing or something like that). Though I suppose "that's Germans, not us" or what not.
I am fundamentally a proponent of UBI but the last thing we want are experiments in pseudo environments.
Edit to say that I too support UBI, and actually helped pass a resolution at my Congressional District's Democratic Party convention in favor of UBI.
Sounds like we have the same concern despite our support.
The last thing I want is useless data. The hawthorne effect is actually at play in many other situations and is generally an underestimated issue with qualitative research.
I was very interested in Even as a company designed to approach challenges like these. I can't imagine how difficult it is to take on a study like this, I'm rooting for them to be successful and hope they share the resulting data. It should always be close to our thoughts - lack of a living wage causing long commutes from soon-to-be gentrified neighborhoods, all in the shadow of Chomsky's Responsibility of Intellectuals.
I do understand the intended meaning of that sentence, and clearly it's more than admirable that these people are putting their money where their mouth is, but I really wish SV people would stop talking this way as it's tone deaf and counterproductive.
Several billion for them and a million and a half for a few people in Oakland implies that they do still find money somewhat interesting.
These are 2, completely separate issues.
Perhaps once this research is done, other people who are more skilled at solving political problems, will take this research and do something useful with it.
UBI isn't something that is going to be done over night. Just look at the the comments here saying that the study won't 'really' measure the effects of UBI unless it is done for decades.
If someone doesn't start the research now, it won't be ready by the time UBI is actually politically feasible.
That's invaluable data and if they can use profits from their ecosystem to support a growing community/ecosystem that supports this, and then discover or create increasing productivity within that community then the model could replicate and be adopted by wider regions.
In reality it does mean giving away a % of earnings to the masses - like a tax, however if that % is less than what people pay on average currently in taxes to government, and the productivity level is higher - then it should naturally compete and takeover (save status quo systems trying to block and cause friction).
Not necessarily. Part of the reason for this research is figuring what to do if the robots replace us for the most part. In that situation wages would likely be low and a lot of the value would move to the market cap of the leading tech stocks that controlled things. The government could tax that, as cgt or wealth tax or similar, rather than wages.
But your point here is well taken - are these rich folks placing bets and toying with poor folks? Hmm.
I think that we should be open to another kind of narratives about this issue.
For instance, we could change the name from "basic income" to "automation dividend".
In this way we could think of it as a right to a share, in the hard work of all the past generations, that created the immense pool of infrastructure and knowledge that we enjoy nowadays.
Also, we shouldn't forget that, in a few years, all 'those people' could be us.
Although for reference 2k a month before taxes is the equivalent of a $12/hr 40hr/wk job. I don't live in Oakland but here in Albuquerque thats considered a pretty good job.
I am very happy living here in Maryland as cost of living is inexpensive and govt. IT jobs are plentiful and the pay is good.
But still something of a worthy experiment, since it's at least slightly different than the yearly tax refunds.
$2k before tax is about 1500 after. $1200 to share a bedroom with someone. $100-200 to eat, $53 muni pass. The rest to cover a litany of other things like cell phone, medical costs, "entertainment", etc.
People have been doing that with free money since forever. You can't package the free money in a different way and expect different results.
Meanwhile, now, it's calling its investments of $120K a "small amount of money"[2], while calling this kind of money ($24K for a year) a basic "income" and not actually treating it as an investment. This bothers me.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120614131411/http://ycombinator...
To put it in simple terms, you get what you pay for. If you invest in someone's startups, they'll deliver a startup (or fail); if you invest in someone's lifestyle, they'll deliver a lifestyle (or fail).
It's what makes a broke college student asking their parents for some money different from a homeless person who has just spent the money he had left on alcohol, asking for some money.
I am probably running a high risk of being misinterpreted. When a programmer becomes homeless and needs money, then that money is different from when someone who got out of prison for beating someone up has no money.
basic income makes it sound like the latter; whereas building a business is a lot more like the former.
you can disagree, but please do so eloquently.
Whether this is true or not is exactly what needs to be figured out. So far, this is just a prejudice.
> When a programmer becomes homeless and needs money, then that money is different from when someone who got out of prison for beating someone up has no money.
And if that person just out of prison was a programmer? Would that change something? What exactly makes a programmer better than anyone who served his time and deserves a chance?
> I hope with a little thought [...] you can disagree, but please do so eloquently
Sorry, neither thinking nor eloquence are my forte. But I did indeed work with homeless people and ex-convicts. Try it and you might see they are people too.
To test this hypothesis, try not coding for a couple weeks, and avoiding other possibly addictive habits. See if you go through a "withdrawal" as it were...best of luck to you and us both!
also let's be clear: from an investment standpoint, investing $12K instead of $120K means that startups can do ten times worse while still being a free investment. put another way: a tenth as many need to succeed to be free. People behave very differently under such conditions of risk!
Also investing $12K made them an investor of first, last, and only resort for startups that needed that. sorry, anecdotally this is actual fact.
granted, this does not describe most startups, just a few.
Americans are so sheltered many have broken minds.
Why did this get voted on in the netherlands? Why is this being tried in America? This is dumber than communism.
The last time we did something this stupid with predictable chaotic results required a corrupt president and retired general. So apparently it has gotten easier since then, to convince people that the shit they're eating is ice cream.
"This study documented large, positive, and sustainable impacts across a wide range of outcomes including assets, earnings, food security, mental health, and domestic violence. It found no evidence of impacts on alcohol or tobacco use, crime, or inflation." [1]
But that was in Kenya so maybe it would be different somewhere else?
I dont recall ever being 'uncivil'. My problem is usually being too kind, in fact.
Like it or not it is a force of nature.
It's a nice, clever cop out but ultimately a cop out. Bicyclist gets hit by a car. Loses his legs. Did he make poor life choices? I wouldn't say so. Say that same bicyclist has built a career as a great door to door sales man. Now he's on hard times. Did he still make poor life choices? Should we, then, all avoid bicycles and work in door to door sales, even if those two things happen to be things people enjoy and, on the whole, beneficial?
You can think of an unlimited number of scenarios where someone has fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. In fact, the most callous and unhelpful thing to say is "you made poor life choices bro" like you even know what you're taking about.
Haha I got downvoted, probably by people who ride bikes.
Hey I love bikes, bikes need their own lane. When I grew up the government told me I could not ride my bike on the sidewalk anymore, so I stopped riding bikes. People who ride bikes in the street get hit by cars all the time. You accept the risks of the activities you participate in. Don't whine about how unfair it is. If you aren't willing to accept those risks then you should not engage in risky behavior.
The logic is as follows: if I'm riding a bike on a sidewalk, the damage I can do to a pedestrian is an order of magnitude less than the car can do in damage to me in the street.
Hence bicycles should be riding with the pedestrians (on a wider sidewalk), in a dedicated bike lane separated from the cars, or should be banned entirely (for the convenience of motorists).
Forcing bikes onto the street with the US driving etiquette is the equivalent to throwing someone in a piranha tank.
Natural selection... More like dumb luck your ignorant persona was born privileged and not having to work your way up through the social structure of a foreign country several times. If it wasn't for public assistance we'd be dead or arrested for god knows what we would have done to put food on the table.
Social services exist to keep you safe from the poor just as much as they exist to keep the poor able to move upward through socioeconomic class