Universal Basic Income Will Accelerate Innovation by Reducing Fears of Failure
medium.com
medium.com
If money is such a saver why doesn't 100% or for that matter 50% of those considered rich have a business or at least try for one? Why doesn't every venture capital fund throw money out like it's candy? The answers is that it's both money and motivation that makes successful people and businesses. Money no matter the amount will demotivate people. If one knows that just by waking up one is guaranteed a way to stay alive then it's much easier to not do anything. It's easier to wait until the perfect idea comes to mind. We (procrastinators) all know that tomorrow is better than today. Whether we like it or not failure is not just about money. It's also about how we are view by others in society and money will not make public perception any easier.
Yes, there's a place for financial aid and such but it needs to be carefully parsed. No, not everybody needs a basic income. Basic income for all is a bad idea.
But still, what is the answer; there are no jobs soon (<100 yrs) for most people, what does 'doing nothing' mean then?
Of course while a UBI of some sort is necessary to deal with the widespread loss of jobs it is hardly sufficient. Most people want to feel useful (mostly as part of something rather than a starter of something) and addressing this need for dignity and acceptance is crucial. Else we'll have more social unrest.
Innovation is generally not accelerated by people that are comfortable/have all of their basic needs met. It's accelerated when you are put into a situation where you need to innovate or fail.
Failure is actually the stimuli and it pushes people to succeed more than anything.
Really? We could certainly come up with stories of great innovation being done by uncomfortably poor people, but I bet if we came up with a list of 100 innovators, at least 80 of them would be from middle-class-plus homes and could almost surely have gotten any number of comfortable-enough jobs doing something un-innovative.
(Edit: which isn't at all to say that non-poor people are more innovative. Just that people who aren't in poverty are far more likely to have the chance for their innovativeness to have a broad public impact.)
Example: The French artisans, the middle class of their time, created wonderful toys for the gentry but almost none of their wonderfully intricate work had any impact on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, while a handful of illiterate working class types turned the Roman water wheel on its side and massively improved mechanical power production.
Their work would have been seen as obscene by the artisans but it was fundamentally more important.
There is a wonderful 1973 documentary by Jacob Bronowski on this topic:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x206z0e_bbc-ascent-of-man-0...
Anybody can be 'possessed' by an idea, but it is clear that Silicon Valley has too many smart and well educated people wasting their time on trifles, their choices significantly retard what ought to be natural advantages.
Most important thing anyone can do is to choose their environment carefully e.g. having the right mentor, role models, choosing the right problem.
Look, I like criticizing Silicon Valley for its ad-dollar silliness as much as anyone else, but that's fundamentally down to what VCs and angel investors are willing to fund. Everyone would work on Mars colonization, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence if they could. Nobody pays you for that, though.
However I notice we have a lot of billionaires and millionaires in comparison to the former centuries. Not many Renaissance Men or aristocratic scholar-patrons (think Lord Asriel from HDM) though. The groups aren't special either. The modern cliques of the rich and powerful I see today are pathetic in comparison to the likes of the Royal Society or the Lunar Society.
Imagination and implementation of the new is hard, but is also a cultural issue. Today I think many people are convinced the low hanging fruit is picked and what remains is the difficult stuff that shall require large sums of capital and decade long education to solve for X.
A favorite saying of comparatively wealthy (or potentially wealthy) people, where "failure" means something on the order of "not being able to retire very comfortably by 40" or "not being able to make a high salary and do what I love for a living." Rather than "getting evicted", "never having decent health insurance", "being stuck in an $18 an hour job for the rest of my life because I felt too discouraged / stressed out / too scared of being in debt for the rest of my life to finish my college degree".
You know, heavy, real, life-choice-limiting and existence-threatening failure like that.
Seriously, the basic income proposal is a very complex topic, with many tradeoffs involved. You can't just deflate even a partial aspect of it (its effect on innovation, for example) with a cute little pinprick like that.
In response to your failure comment: I meant being evicted or not having food on the table if you don't succeed. Not being able to retire by 40 is a very strange idea of 'failure'.
Who thinks this way?
Most businesses in the US are started with loans or personal money and failure means you can't pay the rent.
It will inflate our currency. The middle class will get a pay decrease and money will not go as far because the cost of many things will increase. Wages in many different industries will be increased because it will be difficult to find anyone to work for less than what they are receiving from the government. This sounds great, but it just means an increase in overall costs for many goods and services and the minimum to survive will now be more expensive.
It won't work in the long-run. Everyone seems to think we will have exactly what we have now, but with free money. Free money means we will have more and more people staying out of the workforce and we will eventually run out of people to tax.
Welfare destroyed the lives of many people in my extended family. Most people aren't that ambitious and UBI, which is basically just welfare with no strings attached, will only create generations of people dependent on the government.
As for comparisons with welfare, it's the strings that are the problem with welfare. Think about it. If you are receiving $12,000 in welfare and get a job earning $20,000 you are likely to have a new total of around $20,000. That's because welfare gets pulled away with paid work.
With a $12,000 UBI however, getting a job earning $20,000 would leave you with a new total of $32,000. See the difference? With UBI there is more incentive to work because it's not pulled away with work. UBI doesn't punish you for working. Welfare does.
Do you understand?
The people that I've met who have gotten addicted to drugs, and even committed suicide, were actually those on the dole.
Not sure why.
If the government lets people stay at home and "engage in addictive behavior" (which we humans tend to do) sometimes they degenerate to harder and harder stuff, and even suicide. They're not happy. Are we doing this people a service?
Yes, feelings of uselessness are harmful to people. But the current approach of cutting off people's food, heat and accomodation in an effort to force them to find work somehow is worse. It's possible that "workfare" might be better - but in practice it ends up almost instantly corrupted into a system for giving free or below-minimum-wage labour to businesses while still not providing enough to live on, and usually failing to accomodate the needs of people with disabilities and mental health conditions.
(MH issues are a very strong predictor of unemployment, addiction and suicide, by the way)
And we've also not considered the question of single parents who can often find that employment has marginal or negative returns after childcare and commuting costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fvGasiOkBY
You know what's even more interesting? Penn Jillette supports the idea of basic income. You can hear him talk about it here:
http://ronbenningtoninterviews.com/2016/08/19/penn-jillette-...
If that somehow blows your mind, maybe you should ask yourself if you're missing something that libertarians like Penn aren't missing?
Being destitute is only one of a panoply of goads that can serve as that motivation.
If greed is not motivating, then should we not tax the wealthy until they too are in "jeopardy of failure" otherwise capitalism is very far from efficiently deploying the resources of the world.
By your theory, software engineers won't go on to found successful companies, since they always a cushy programming career to fall onto.