What is a viable alternative to basic income? | Hacker News Reader

What is a viable alternative to basic income?

22 pointstanto50 comments

Assumption 1: Basic income is bad and will destroy the world economy.

Assumption 2: Automation of white collar jobs will happen at a scale of 99% of all white collar jobs (through AI or otherwise) and automation of low skilled jobs will be achieved for 99.9999% of all work through one or another way.

Assumption 3: 0.1% of the human population will be enough to do all work which machines can't do to theoretically support all human life on earth.

Is A2/3 exaggerated? Lets not dispute A1 even when its highly disputable. Just assume we can't have basic income in any form.

My question is what are viable alternatives to basic income in this scenario?

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Money is a [bad] stand-in for value. If "AI" is doing most of the work we have today both mental (programming, financial, etc) and physical (building homes, unclogging toilets, picking up litter) then people would just shift to work which does continue to exist (e.g. creative endeavours) and put value on that instead.

No matter how much you automate and how many jobs are displaced there will always be an infinite amount more work and different jobs will be assigned different values artificially.

To get specific, very few people are needed anymore to supply all the food/water/basics of life to a society. It is all already heavily automated. But are less people employed or are working hours shorter? No. We just found new ways to occupy our time and assigned those a value.

Take the Star Trek universe (where they got rid of money). There's a lot of unanswered questions about that concept, for example how do you divide up land? And who's to say running a wine vineyard is a more productive use of a plot than building a science facility (in particular with replicators in this context).

The more the deep you get into these questions the more artificial the way human society is structured seems. I legitimately think that people will always have jobs/work and there will always be some kind of compensation, but that work will move further and further away from the core resources that keep a society running (and the jobs themselves will have less and less actual value).

> Take the Star Trek universe (where they got rid of money).

They didn't in the "Star Trek universe" -- money is frequently used in the universe, and often things involving it are part of the plots of episodes. They may (or may not) have done so on Earth or within the Federation more generally (there are mixed indicators, but people at least frequently claim that is true from Next Gen on [actually, I think the first reference is in STIV, though in context that may be a joke more based on the character's immediate circumstances]; its pretty clearly not in TOS, and I think that there is a specific reference to a purchase being made on Earth in STII.)

Yes. See, for example, Ferengis, a Star Trek race that are obsessed with money.

> No matter how much you automate and how many jobs are displaced there will always be an infinite amount more work and different jobs will be assigned different values artificially.

Something that always gets missed in this is the limits on our ability to consume more. We can't eat more, we can't watch more TV because there isn't enough time in the day. The only growth area in consumption lately is gadgets but upgrading them is showing signs of diminishing returns.

I used to be really excited about new gadgets, but I'm totally unmoved by a slightly thinner phone that does roughly the same thing my old one did.

It isn't like 2000, where I would _need_ a new graphics card to play a new video game, or I could get an ipod and not have to haul around a backpack full of cd binders

I could still get excited about a new phone that sends less data to advertising companies, or that supports a wider range of open standards than the previous one, or that exposes more of its internal tech for developers to use or improve. Perhaps once these devices stop getting better, it will be easier for a community-driven open source OS to occupy a a viable 1-3% market share and make the tech work for us rather than for the rent-seeking companies that own this space today.

I generally agree, but I wouldn't call the current structure artificial. That means it was somehow planned by a central artificer to have its current structure.

The current social structure is rather the result of a very long and decentralized evolutionary process whereby older ways of doing one specific thing were piecemeal replaced by newer attempts, which then either spread or died off. Of course, vestigal parts remain, and sometimes they cause problems.

What about gold pressed latinum? Sure seems like money to me, and for a utopian money-free society the Federation folks always seem to have a few strips for the Ferengi

"Take the Star Trek universe (where they got rid of money)"

The Star Trek universe is basically ridiculous on this concept.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with money - moreover, it's basically nutbars to talk about getting rid of it.

Money is a medium of exchange so that when we accumulate 'value creation' we can apply that to things we want, rather than have to barter for them (I'll trade you 2 hours consulting for a new pair of shoes).

Money is extremely useful. Star Trek got rid of it for ideological reasons - Gene Roddenberry was a little bit of a communist. Those ideas used to be popular i.e. 'If we only got rid of money everything would be fair'.

As far as 'division of land' - it's not just land - it's everything. ALL surpluses need to be divided somehow. Unless a centralized state entity steps in and decides all prices (i.e. Soviet Union), well, you let people exchange their services for 'social credit' (i.e. money) and then let them exchange the money for other things and services.

"The more the deep you get into these questions the more artificial the way human society is structured seems. "

There's nothing 'artificial' about it. It's called 'comparative value' and it's a cornerstone of capitalism.

Instead of income, what about necessities for a modern life? Shelter, safety, medical care, nutrition and internet access? These could be provided at a minimum instead of the income (ostensibly) designed to be used for these things.

> These could be provided at a minimum

Not this story again.

If you provide any of those "at a minimum" then only the "minimum" will be available to the people, and those who will define what the minimum is will be those who have nothing to gain by providing those goods and services, and everythin to gain by cutting all costs and expenses right to the bone.

Moreover, is it really necessary to point out the dangers of letting the state gain control over who accesses to the internet?

This seems like a strange objection, relying as it does on "the gain" made by those who control what the "minimum" is. Postulates A2 and A3, which are assumed to hold for this question, make any savings from the cut "costs and expenses" seem a bit ridiculous.

The state can control who can access the Internet even now, via the courts, should it decide someone needs to get b&. I'm not sure why a surfeit of every possible resource is going to make the government get more totalitarian.

If the unrolled form of this argument is "human social competitiveness is impossible to extinguish, and even in the presence of historically unprecedented AI-based plenty, those who desire power will subjugate those they deem lesser, for the hell of it", then this makes a whole lot more sense.

Of course, giving people money to buy these things is easier and probably cheaper than giving either the things themselves or special vouchers that the merchants for approved necessities can exchange for money. Someone has to administer all of these things and come up with rules for them and monitor compliance.

I mean, look at SNAP and the ridiculous recurring argument over what parts of a cow it is permissible to purchase with a voucher.

With vouchers, you are ultimately giving someone with a gun the power to enforce that the voucher is spent correctly, with cash you are not (although the why is proving hard to articulate, I'm pretty sure this is true)

No i'm literally talking about eliminating the free market from the equation for the bare necessities. No vouchers, you give people the minimum required nutrition, whoever wants it. Soylent or whatnot.

Not vouchers for housing, you build specific housing for this purpose. Basically communism for the bottom rung of society, though anyone is free to participate in the capitalistic parts of society anytime they wish. High wealth individuals coudl just as easily decide to reap the benefits of free housing and/or nutrition. Just a thought.

That's even harder to do than vouchers. Instead of centrally managing certificates you have an entire country's worth of logistic problems. I can't even begin to imagine the government structure needed to buy store and cart Soylent from Puerto Rico to Alaska.

Let alone government built housing keeping up with population distribution changes.

I like how your proposal doesn't imply a big public -> private wealth transfer, but I think what you are suggesting is much, much harder than making it rain on everybody

Hold up on my last line ^

Where do you get the soylent/electricity/housing/phone/internet from?

Are you proposing that the government fire up soylent plants, buy power plants, build, own and maintain housing and become a telecom provider?

Or is the government going to buy from private companies?

Yep, this is a very bad idea for the most part; these things already exist with private industry, so it's much easier for government to just allocate and distribute money, and let people buy things from existing providers instead of getting the government into the distribution of goods business. There's definitely room for more government regulation, especially with housing (that one's a mess, with all the foreign investors pumping up the realty prices; some simple laws should fix that), and also telecom (basically we need to copy whatever Europe's doing there).

Euro-style telecoms do seem to be kicking US style telecom ass, from a consumer perspective. I know I'm jealous.

I think it's hard to untangle foreign investment from local real estate prices without running into some of the US's fundamental "freedom" tenets, but I haven't looked very closely into what we might do. I feel like it is more of a NIMBY problem, most places

It shouldn't be that hard to enact some laws which make it really hard or unprofitable to be an absentee landlord. Perhaps rules requiring property owners to personally show up for annual property inspections? An easy one would be rules preventing corporations from purchasing residential property (after it's been constructed and on the market; it's normal for corporations to own it initially during construction and first-sale). There should be some other sneaky ways that localities could throw up roadblocks to foreign investors and other absentee landlords, and use them to seize the property.

I read about a Seattle law where non-code compliant rentals are forbidden from raising their rent. That might help

It depends on what it is.

Giving people money to buy food is much easier and cheaper than setting up and administering a system to provide food for people, monitor compliance, etc. Food is available just about anywhere from an enormous number of vendors, producers, suppliers, etc. There's no reason to get government too closely involved there, except of course for food-safety inspections and the like, which we already have. Food is a very competitive industry.

Healthcare, on the other hand, is totally different, and we're already seeing how trying to use a free-market approach there just doesn't work. This is an industry that needs some kind of nationalization (like single-payer coverage, plus a lot of regulation to keep costs down). No one calls up 3 different ERs and ambulance companies when they have a heart attack to see which one offers the best price and service.

I'm on board with central healthcare. I think the government excels at organizing people and distributing people and tasks across the country, but I'm pretty skeptical of their ability to handle inventory or do construction that doesn't lean on private industry (I mean, I'm sure they could, it's just not what the government is set up to do right now)

Of course, the military is a great logistics machine, but it's also a specialist branch of the government

The military is great at logistics, but it also doesn't do any construction (unless it's on a battlefield): all that stuff is contracted out, as is manufacturing of weapons. They have a big hand in the nitty-gritty details of these things, but ultimately they're done by private companies.

Government doesn't even need to be in the healthcare business per se: that can all be done by private providers. Government's role is to regulate it to keep costs down (similar to however they do it in places like Belgium), and to provide the funding. If Belgium can do it, we should be able to do it too. But maybe we need to hire the Belgians to help us set up the system....

Vouchers are central planning (each person should spend this much money on this particular good). Cash is distributed planning.

That's a pretty catchy way of phrasing what I was trying to get at.

I'm pretty sure central planning is inherently coercive and tends to be more expensive than distributed planning. I also think distributed planning is generally more efficient

I haven't given a lot of thought to basic income, but coming from a third-world country, I immediately think of how that can lead to corruption, nepotism, and unfairness in general. (e.g. who gets higher-valued real estate?)

Also not a lot of thought, but my immediate reaction would be that none of the land that was "given away" (or provided to people) would be high value whatsoever. Basically just plots of land with viable homes, community space, no outright ownership.

Private land would remain private.

Of course, then you have "slums," essentially, and problems that come with that.

They are not slums when the people are not living in poverty.

There will be people in poverty when they spend their basic income checks on drugs...

You're confusing two things together. There are drug addicts who have to be saved by means in addition to financial means for basic necessities. But the majority of poor people aren't like that. It's not to say poverty can be totally eliminated, but it will be massively improved upon at the very least.

Basic income would not lift people out of poverty.

What's the very definition of "poverty"? Having no money for even the basic necessities. By its very definition, basic income deals with that. Surely there are drug addicts etc. who would just be fucked no matter whether they have money or not. But if you genuinely believe that every poor man is like that, you're way too brainwashed by the rightist elitist BS justifications for their own wealth, my friend.

I think you have not understood the meaning of "basic income". It means everyone is issued fiat currency sufficient to supply necessities, i.e. super-poverty housing, food, clothing, medical care. End of story. The money is just printed tokens anyhow, so it is inhumane to deny people in need if you can just print it. The down-sides are inflationary effects (but in the new normal, deflation is a problem, so that is actually good), and fear of damaging work-ethic (a moral hazard). I consider that if the work-ethic is obsolete, it is maladaptive, and needs to be put out of its misery.

It seems like a lot of people simply cannot grasp the idea of the UBI at all. Half the time when I talk to someone new about it, they think it's Soviet-style communism and a centralized planned economy! It's utterly bizarre. It's such a simple concept: everyone gets a check from the government for, say, $1500 per month (the actual amount isn't really important, just that it's enough to live in an apartment with a roommate basically and afford you food at the grocery store). Then I get questions like "but lots of people don't want to live like that!". Answer: "Well, they'll get a job, just like they do now....". "Then they'll lose their benefits..." Or, "why would anyone get a job when they can just collect $1500/month doing nothing?" Answer: "Maybe because they don't want to live like a pauper? The same reason lots of people get a job now instead of just living off welfare?" And these don't seem to be stupid people either; we see them right here on this forum, people with degrees in CS or whatever, and simply cannot grasp this concept at all. Maybe we really are just dump monkeys with slightly oversized brains.

I do believe, however, that UBI really needs single-payer healthcare for it all to work. If they supply enough UBI for health insurance, the costs are going to be astronomical, or they'll have to tax the working people to death (which will make lots of them just quit and live off the UBI, which will break down the system). Something has to be done to rein in medical costs like they do in European nations for this to work if it's going to include medical care, and really, medical insurance should mostly be eliminated.

I blog about this sometimes. I think well designed gig work and more affordable housing would solve this. I think if we don't tackle the affordable housing angle, no amount of basic income (aka supplementing the income of the poorest people) is going to be enough to solve the problem. Housing keeps getting bigger and more expensive and there is no upper limit to how far that can go. We need to put down a floor so housing is accessible for ordinary people with ordinary jobs.

Here are a few of the posts I have written on this topic:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/06/gig-work-don...

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/05/gig-work-tha...

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/money-is-not...

You'd have to make additional assumptions in that scenario to come up with a viable solution other than "Kill all the humans.".

Perhaps there is a category of jobs that hasn't been invented yet or that already exists but under the current economic conditions can't support more than a handful of people. White collar jobs have existed for millennia, too (scribes, accountants, civil servants). However, it was only with the Industrial Revolution demand for those jobs really took off.

Maybe, some day we'll all be some kind of artists or entertainers. On a more sinister note, perhaps we end up like the humans in the Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits", where humans have to cycle on exercise bikes day in and day out to generate power and receive credits in return.

Those are all very hypothetical assumptions, though. In my opinion, not making any additional assumptions a basic income as of now is the by far most realistic - perhaps even the only - way of dealing with such a - quite likely -scenario.

I don't think an AI would need to kill them. Just ignore them because they are uneconomic and they will die on their own.

Depends how much damage they can do

Could it be that humanity at large is doomed to repeat its usual method of a "reset"? Planet Earth isn't getting any bigger, and if we're lucky worldwide population may plateau around 11 billion. Per Wikipedia, "Global workforce": "As of 2012, the global labor pool consisted of approximately 3 billion workers, around 200 million unemployed." Per The World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS), labor force participation has dropped from a little over 66% in 1990 to barely 64% in 2014. They give a per-country overview of these rates, and also per-income levels:

    High income	60%	60%
    Upper middle income	72%	67%
    Middle income	67%	63%
    Lower middle income	62%	59%
    Low & middle income	68%	64%
    Low income	77%	77%

High and Low income held steady, every other level shows decline.

Take a look at http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/..., which has this byline (June 2012): Strains on the global labor force are becoming painfully evident. Market forces will fail to resolve demand and supply imbalances for tens of millions of skilled and unskilled workers.

As automation becomes ever more adaptive and versatile, it will be interesting to see in what ways human employment may somehow remain economically of interest. But right now the labor force participation trends downward, and the only way that could be good is if the non-participation people are having healthfully happy lifestyles - perhaps as retirees or married to well-to-do spouses.

But if the social order of things is changing such that the prospect of gainful employment becomes less tenable for most, here's to hoping that a better world may yet emerge with minimal strife. Otherwise, it's all too easy to imagine us collectively squabble and fret over moral hazards, free-loaders, and property rights (including the intellectual kind), and that the crisis must first reach a breaking point before any material changes can happen.

If UBI is a non-starter, I've got no ideas other than for maybe getting serious about space travel and colonization.

There's absolutely no economic rationale for space travel and colonization. If you have automation doing all the lower-end jobs, and no way of transitioning society past the current system where you have to work to support yourself, it's very simple: all these extra people will have to be eliminated. So we have 3 choices: 1) start up death camps and start transporting unemployed people to them for disposal, 2) undergo a violent economic collapse with food riots, uncontrolled crime, etc., or 3) institute a UBI. Only one of these is humane and rational.

I actually think what will happen is a combination of a welfare state with some type of "jobs program" even if the job is just something useless or " study in university" etc.

But one thing is very worrisome - this all depends on the power of the people to rule , but companies seem very good at resisting that power (for ex. Tax loopholes, lobbying) , and if companies and psychopathic tendencies have their way - it would be pretty bad .

Here's some food for though:

When the automated looms were invented, people thought all jobs would soon go away to the machines, with nothing to do. Surprisingly, new jobs were invented and people have been busy since then. I bet there was something similar happening in ancient Egypt as well, knowing how there are writings about how "the youth do not write properly these days, and the world is going to the dogs soon. Everything was better during my childhood." Look it up.

So I would suggest you clean your pants and don't worry about automation. Just go with the flow and keep an eye open for the radically new form of jobs that will open up.

Also, most of you folks work in services. You build webpages, web applications, SaaS, corporate software or consult on their integration, yada yada. You will never go out of work. This is a big world, and opportunity will remain plenty. It's just changing like it was changing in the early days of industrial machines. Put in the effort to find new frontiers.

>in ancient Egypt ... there are writings about how "the youth do not write properly these days, and the world is going to the dogs soon. Everything was better during my childhood." Look it up.

When people claim something dubious and back it up with "look it up" and no further sources, I reach for my gun. Most of those supposed ancient quotes about youth are modern nonsense, and as Google returns no results for your particular quote (and "going to the dogs" is a 16th century English idiom anyway) I'm going to go with "you made it up". Please don't make things up and exhort people to "look it up".

Income-less, post-scarcity society, where the limits of what goods/services you can access are so much higher than you could ever need that the only limitations put in place can be set democratically?

That, or just increase typical socialist democratic welfare state principles, tax the hell out of the .01% and invest in public goods.

it could be more distributed. currently, if you own about $1,000,000 US in assets you can probably live of your return on your assets. what if you could retire on 10k or 1k in assets because of massive deflation and control of information(patents, copyrights) was loosened or replaced.

The industrial revolution had a much greater impact on labour than anything we are seeing happening today.

Previous to this era - humans and animals did everything.

Can you imagine how many buggies the steam engines put out?

But the factories employed a lot of people who would have been doing other things.

Since then, we've constantly been going through this process.

Moreover - the biggest impact on labour today is not automat ion - it's cheaper labour in the rest of the world.

As factories become a little more automated, it will start at the bottom - with the simplest tasks. Those jobs are already mostly outsourced. 'Automation' is going to hit China harder than it hits the US.

As for 'basic income' - even applied in a normal context without the treat of disastrous unemployment ... 'means tested welfare' is one option. If we adjusted it a little so that people could possibly find work while still on welfare without losing benefits, this would take away some of the limitations.

The difference is that the industrial revolution amplified labor, while AI actually replaces it in many cases. AI + human is less productive than AI sans human. It's not just a difference in magnitude, but one of sign.

Cheaper labor elsewhere does not obsolete labor itself, it merely implies repricing or arbitrage.

It doesn't really matter how hard the labor market is hit, once it is already dead.

Means tested welfare fosters dependency, crime and generational poverty, and implies support of a vast administration and enforcement apparatus. It is used as a coercive stick to compel behaviors, and often those behaviors are harmful to the individual recipient - e.g. families that go fatherless, to protect AFDC.

"AI + human is less productive than AI sans human."

This is totally speculative on your part and it depends on the task.

Social darwinism (our current system to some degree) is viable for a certain continuing percentage of the population.

The social darwinists are in charge of a society that benefits them. Changing that reality is going to be prohibitively difficult.

Resource contention with coercion, violence and/or warfare, which AFAIK is something we've had for thousands of years.

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