Hacker News Reader

Comment by harigov | Hacker News Reader

In other developed countries, I think universal basic income makes sense, but not in the case of India. India has several systemic problems and a significant portion of the population has little to no education. Any income that can sustain a household without any pressure to grow as people will probably hinder their progress more so than help them. For a country with no lack of problems to solve, they are much better off to incentivize people to learn, teach or do charity than to just hand over some money for being citizens. Similarly, I am of the opinion that India is better off spending that money by identifying all the organizational systems that it lacks like waste processing, water purification, security, monitoring, etc., and funding several startups in those areas. This is similar to how YC funds startups so it is using market forces to solve systemic problems without resorting to centralized planning and execution.

View on HN

>> Any income that can sustain a household without any pressure to grow as people will probably hinder their progress more so than help them.

I disagree. I believe the better place where one should do this is where it's needed the most.

People tend to believe that when given money, others will just sit back and get lazy doing nothing. Matter of fact is you need money to do anything; to give your children a better education, to buy tools to help you at your job, to buy appliances that free your time to have other projects, etc. Do you think these people are comfortable with their lifestyle? Handing them free money, IMO, more than being an excuse to "hinder progress", will be an investment that finally allow them to get over working to "just survive" and into the realm of working to actually ensure their kids are better off than they were.

This is similar to how YC funds startups. Or in fact, how anyone funds startups. No one says "Oh, if we give you a nice economic cushion, that'll probably hinder your progress, you need to be under the constant stress and problem of having no money to really get clever and do cool things." Of course not, that's nuts. You invest money to make money.

While I agree with you on the perks of a UBI, I think India is not yet in a place where UBI could work.

As mentioned in the article, the pay would be a meagre Rs. 7000 per annum. To put it in perspective, I found it hard to keep my expenses per month to under Rs. 8000, living frugally as a student, with basically free housing and subsidized food.

Sure there are millions of people who would appreciate this sum and might gain some benefits from them, but it would be inconsequential to about 70-75% of the population. That's a lot of money wasted. It might br better to have focused welfare programs which would put this money to better use. For instance, government sponsored vocational training programs. India has a vast network of NGOs, and many of them have such programs. Another venue to invest this money might be on rural education systems. A disturbing number of them are not functional, where both teachers and students infrequently visit a shabby one room building to have free mid-day meals (I don't have any woes with this program, btw). Better infrastructure, better teacher training programs, are all venues that would benefit from the money. Ofcourse these venues are riddled with a corrupt administration which would substantially diminish the returns, but UBI distribution too might have similar problems.

Basically, in a country with this population, and with a huge wealth divide, I think UBI is a very ineffective welfare program.

What the??

8k a month is good for a huge chunk of our country.

The poverty line is in the mere tens of rupees per day when I last checked.

32 rs/day for rural india and 47 rs/day in cities.

32x30 is ~1000 rs.

Additionally, 25% or so are below the poverty line.

That's how bad it is. I think discussing welfare programs without knowing what the poverty line is resulted in misplaced goalposts.

> Any income that can sustain a household without any pressure to grow as people will probably hinder their progress more so than help them

Are you basing this off of any familiarity with poor Indian culture?

Why do you expect "free money" to translate into "lesser progress" rather than "progress of their choice"?

Here's a different question: Have you learned more through self-directed learning, or other-directed learning? How have you chosen what to learn, and would you still have that drive-to-learn if you had free money?

Remember that UBI is in addition to salaries / wages, not instead of.

Most of the poor (and the rich too) here (I mean in India) look at such social programs as nothing more than cash-grabs. I have known people who make money by registering for multiple CNG connections and distributing them to other people in return for full price of the CNG cylinder (the cylinders are subsidised and the subsidy is paid by the government directly into the bank account of the person with whom the connection is registered).

I would venture that the vast majority of people will benefit from a small amount of income compared to the small amount who will take advantage of the system.

But you Also don't hear of the person who didn't get to eat cooked food because he didn't have gas regularly either.

There will always be abusers.

You hear this same thing about food stamps in the US, to the point that Republican lawmakers start calling for big-government style drug testing (at the taxpayers expense) of welfare recipients.

Wasteful spending and big government bullshit coming from one hand, while the mouth can't stop talking about cutting back on both.

This is basically the same argument in general against basic income, prepended with "in the case of India, it won't work because... "

I don't know if basic income works, but that's why experiments in the field are required. None of the reasons you have pointed out seem to be apply only to India.

Isn't one goal of UBI to allow people to invest in something like education (lowers wages for a long time; promises to increase them after relevant schooling) instead of forcing them to choose the long-run suboptimal strategy of leaving education to pursue wages that they need today?

> ...they are much better off to incentivize people to learn, teach or do charity than to just hand over some money for being citizens.

A lot of money does get earmarked for this purpose, and then gets funneled into the pockets of corrupt officials and politicians. I think that's what this income is supposed to help prevent. It's not the only way -- tracking money flow in general helps.

(The previous demonetization move was also supposed to help accomplish something similar, i.e. track if money is going to corrupt politicians instead of the impoverished people it is meant for.)

I think in contrary this is the ideal experiment since aspirations generally float high in aggressively growing economies. This is the exact opposite of Mao's' communism where people were forced to pick up skills based on a notion of a common good. A UBI can enable individuals to select, educate and work on tasks big and small, knowing that the govt. is behind them.

And people are going to learn when they are trying to fill their belly from day to day? You are putting this backwards. [Maslow's hierarchy of needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs) comes to mind.

I travelled to India for 3 months some years ago. I could live there with 300 EUR a month in a nice little hotel in Himachal Pradesh no less. I could have gotten a room for just 1 EUR a day which I saw with my own eyes, simple room clean in a Tibetan run building. But this hotel had wifi downstairs which they changed the password only every few days, I had a TV, full size bed, private bathroom and toilet with running water (no carrying buckets or rationing like the people living in the area), etc.

I remember back then, 2010 is not so long ago, I could eat plenty for less than 300 INR a day (so approx. 2-3 EUR). Like a nice bowl of Tibetan noodles was 80 INR if I remember, and that was filling for a third of the day, and that's not even 1 EUR (Of course if I bought a coca cola then I would have paid 100 INR or more).

When a foreigner can live there with 300 EUR a month and be quite comfortable;, just imagine the change of quality of life it makes to people in poverty if they had just 100 EUR a month.

>I am of the opinion that India is better off spending that money by identifying all the organizational systems that it lacks like waste processing, water purification, security, monitoring, etc., and funding several startups in those areas.

Or just spend the money and build it directly.

The idea that UBI should be higher on the priority list than basic infrastructure is pretty crazy.

It's not. This is happening now any way. The debate is on which system is more effective at helping People out of poverty.

It can be done anywhere.

...developed country?

I find it amusing that people went from "raising a minimum wage is a bad thing to do" to "unconditionally giving everyone a set amount of money will be the best thing ever".

Different people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com