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Comment by leurfete | Hacker News Reader

I come from the heart of tea-party country. My impression is that people believe government handouts destroy any illusion that one might have of self-sufficiency and instill a sense of helplessness. There could be some merit to this idea. [1]

It's one reason I'm skeptical of basic income. Burying money and putting people to work "mining" it, as Keynes once suggested, might even be a better alternative. [2] :]

1.) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2202/1944-2858.1158/ab...

2.) http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/john_maynard_keynes_quot...

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Well, how about a citizen's dividend[0]? Instead of making people jump through hoops to prove they're not secretly working (why do we want people to not work?) and that they're not doing drugs or buying nonessential goods (heaven forbid they buy a new phone!), why not give everybody certificates and paperwork explaining to them their rights as citizens of the country to a portion of the wealth produced from the bounty of the land to which they are entitled? Give them detailed information on the economy and the GDP, its growth, and show directly how it affects their bottom line in the form of a dividend paid monthly into their bank account.

It doesn't even have to stop there. The information can also talk about how they as individuals can get involved in having a say in the future direction of the economy, including what to do with future tax, tariff, and bond revenues. If you treat people like the owners of their nation and give them a real piece of the pie and a real say over how it's governed, their learned helplessness [1] is liable to diminish!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

In a democracy, giving some people a "real say" means denying other people a "real say."

I agree with you. UBI will be hated by people because it is a forced equalizer and removes agency from their hands.

UBI depends on tax collection, but state is corruptible and companies are greedy. This puts people in a bad position, but, if you think about it, companies are going to be in a weird position too - when people are moneyless, who's going to buy their products? Is it sane to tax companies, give free money to people in order to buy products from said companies?

The solution should include breaking automation monopolies and empowering people. Instead of UBI, what we need is to spread the use of automation and AI technologies in all parts of society, with the aim of achieving self sufficiency on a country, region and community level.

Research in self sufficiency should also include solar energy, water filtration, sustainable agriculture and 3D-printing - all that is required to live off-grid. I envision co-ops formed of a few thousand people, farming land, making houses, offering education and health services for its members.

If we're not going to get jobs, we need to own and rely on automation instead.

Isn't the whole point of UBI is to smooth out and provide a safety net for those displaced by advancing technology?

But in order to happen, it requires the cooperation of the state and companies.

In the past, people had work. Each person was inextricably linked to his/her work power. In order for companies to function, they simply had to pay people to work, there was no other way around it. But after automation, most people will have nothing to offer any more. So people lose their self reliance ability and become dependent upon the state, at the mercy of political and economic games.

A horror scenario I imagine is if the state does give UBI, but it is too small. It would feel like communism in the Eastern Europe where everyone had a "job" (mostly posing to work) and everyone got a salary, but it wasn't much. The joke going around was "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us!" What can people do if the UBI is too small? Start a revolution? I'd bet on self-reliance as a much more stable solution.

Instead of collecting tax in a big pot and then doling UBI to everyone, self reliance splits the single point of failure, and allows more experimentation and ingenuity at grassroot level.

In the past, people had work.... But after automation, most people will have nothing to offer any more.

The same arguments were used at the advent of the industrial revolution. There will still be work after robotics, just not the same work.

How do you know? You are just making an assertion. It is not a law of nature.

If you will forgive some hyperbole: After the industrial revolution, you no longer needed peoples' hands, just their brains. Now we will no longer need peoples' brains.

Automation is a process that proceeds step by step, not a repeating pattern.

Hopefully there is still something left that means there will still be a need for a large number of humans. But I think it is arrogant to just assert that. For every part of what humans can deliver that you replace there is less left where humans are needed.

> How do you know?

We don't know. But it has been true for every technology change since the discovery of agriculture so it is a high probability assertion. It might be different next time, of course, but the implication is that humanity won't create knew things to do as it has always done in the past. I don't see any evidence of a diminution of creativity but maybe you do.

In the industrial revolution we mostly automated blunt physical labor. In the AI revolution we will automate intellectual labor. Robots are also becoming more dexterous. I don't think history can guide us here.

Objectively valuable human endeavors could shrink to nothing, though we will probably at least buy ourselves time with genetic tampering and brain prostheses.

Perhaps humanity's salvation will come from selling hand-crafted goods? Maybe the AIs will keep us around like pets (see The Culture novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks#The_Culture_novels)?

No sense in not charging ahead though. The potential upside is too awesome to leave on the table. We face existential risk regardless.

> I don't think history can guide us here

Of course it can. What has been consistent over centuries is that, as we've automated physical and intellectual labour, we've replaced it with other forms of physical and intellectual labour. Not in equal amounts, sure, but we've adapted. It's why we have, on average, more people in education for longer than historically, for example.

I agree it's fun to extrapolate this to some form of asymptotic future but just because we can envisage future X doesn't mean it will occur (William Gibson novels aside, of course).

UBI doesn't have to depend on tax collection. It can also be a replacement for monetary policy, and in that form would be more delicate control than the current open-market operations, since it is not subjected to an easily-manipulated money multiplier. It may also be fairer since it creates capital markets from the bottom up, thus enabling small-scale entrepreneurship through personal liquidity. Some might see that as far more democratic than buying bonds from merchant banks. It also suggests a more direct adjustment of inflation, rather than manipulating inflation through the effects of interest rate on debt.

This is all somewhat theoretical because any discussion of change to central banking systems ends up stymied by institutional resistance, public confusion, entrenched interests, and political reluctance. Nonetheless the option exists. If I was studying towards an economics PhD right now, I'd probably be modelling the comparative behaviours & outcomes of UBI-based monetary policy.

p.s. your vision of autonomous communities makes me dream of an end to nation states and a return to the sovereign municipalities of both the distant past and a [science-fiction future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age).

I thought one of the major benefits of UBI was that, because it's universal, there's less stigma attached? If you're either "working" or "on the dole" then the latter makes you feel pretty useless. If everyone gets UBI then looking forward to yours is legitimized. It'd become no different to a tax return.

Yes! A great example of this is Social Security (US national retirement income). SS is not mean-tested, and enjoys the fiction of "you get what you put into it." So there's no stigma attached in receiving it.

I do not support means-testing SS because I believe in the program and want to see it continue. Means-testing will make it indistinguishable from welfare and thus politically vulnerable. UBI is the same.

> fiction

This is key. The reality is irrelevant. What matters is how the culture chooses to interpret it. Social attitudes are not particularly rational.

Social Security recipients feel that they have "earned" their retirement income, though, because they paid into the system during forty-seven-or-so years of their working life.

UBI does not solve the basic problem that a good percentage of one's sense of personal worth is tied up in work. Giving people a check is not the same as giving them something meaningful to do with their life.

Personally I find it hard to support UBI on any large scale without more understanding of the unintended side effects.

UBI doesn't stop people from working - it provides the flexibility to chose to work at what is meaningful to you.

The reason unintended side effects happen is because they can't be articulated beforehand.

What if it’s not payed work but meaningful activities that leads to self worth. Many activities may not be generating direct economic value but may still contribute to society. Different types of environmental or community work are examples of that category.

I feel like there will still be a stigma attached. The people who are paying more in to UBI than they receive back will (rightly?) feel like they are propping up those who are not working and therefore paying less / nothing. I would not personally 'look forward' to receiving a UBI check if I know that my taxes have increased by more than the value of the UBI.

>It's one reason I'm skeptical of basic income.

The major problem of means tested welfare is that if you want to do a low paying job that you lose more in benefits than you gain in income. The dependees are acting rationally in this regard, they didn't lose their "self-sufficiency".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

UBI doesn't have this problem.

Pavlina Tcherneva on Job Guarantee vs Basic Income: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_-CRquE_bU&feature=youtu.be...

My impression is that it's largely down to who they think gets those handouts. The perception that the face of need and poverty in the US is principally black, has always driven conservative opposition to 'big government', welfare and government paid healthcare, certainly since the Civil Rights Act.

This invites the question of whether socialist policies might have a better prospect in a hypothetical future US partitioned into ethno-states.

Ah, the illusions. Many Russians lives in poverty and the state doesn't do anything for them, but the latter fuels their ideal of being a Great World Power. So they keep voting for those who fleece their country in exchange of some illusory identity.

As a corollary, 70% of the people in the Dust Bowl stayed.

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