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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

I would speculate that any end date on this scenario will invalidate results. What a person does if it is guaranteed a job for life vs 5 years is wildly different, as you'll need to make sure when those 5 years are up, you'll be ready to enter the job market again, etc. I believe the same will happen with basic income. If we want to study where people gravitate to more fulfilling jobs, feel happier and so on, you need to guarantee them that stability forever. Otherwise people will just rationalize that they got some free money for a while and will not behave in the same way.

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This assumes people will enjoy a 5 year vacation though. In Norway if you're chronically disabled you can apply for something that seems very similar to basic income. I'm in that system and in my experience most of the people I know in this system are bored. It could be because all their friends are working so it's difficult to meet new people, there's also that this system is for disabled people and people with mental issues could find it difficult to meet other people, etc.

I remember working somewhere where I was being tested before getting into this system and I met plenty who said they were heavily advised not to go back to work by their doctors. They want to do /something/ because being at home watching TV gets boring after half a year. So they were sent to that place in the meantime. I have other friends who are in this system who end up working in charity somewhere.

But most of my friends i met in this system ended up finding a job, despite being promised permanent "universal income".

In the past if you tried to work somewhere while being in this system, and it worked but you got sick again you'd have to reapply (which is a very long process) but now it's changed so it acts more as a safety net in case working somewhere doesn't work out for your health. I've heard this is to encourage people to work and I've heard (from the people who work in the system) that it's successful so far.

This doesn't assume they'll take a 5 year vacation at all. It's the difference between deciding to become an artist because you know you'll never worry about money, and deciding to study accounting so you can eventually have an accounting job you don't care about that will support your evening art practice.

Most will take a 5 year vacation.

They said without any research backing their statement whatsoever...

It's common sense if you have any interaction with US society. Not every common sense thing needs to be verified by a costly scientific study. Though some researchers try.

Plenty of things that people think are "common sense" are far from it. If you want to make a assertion such that you have, you'll have to have evidence.

It's commonly said to be common sense to justify cutting and severely restricting social programs, but rarely with supporting evidence of widespread abuse. Usually just small amounts.

In my experience it is hard to take a 3 week vacation without coming across an idea which "I would do if I had more time". I bet some interesting results will come out of this research even if every single person starts their 5 years with a vacation.

Maybe you would, and you know what? Good for you if you do.

Just about everyone I know would start a business, volunteer, do creative things, contribute to making the world a better place.

But, at the end of the day, I don't care how people spend their time or their money. If some fraction of the population wanted to bum around on their minimal UBI for the rest of their lives, fine by me. It's never going to lead to a life of luxury, and I quite honestly don't care if that's how they want to waste their lives.

If you don't care at all, then why are you okay financing that situation with your taxes?

This argument has no foundation in logic. There is a subset of people who are fine with paying those taxes and do not care how the intermediary recipients of those funds spend them.

Shit, man. If "financing things I don't like with my taxes" is the hill I'm going to die on, I'm going to set my sights on the insane military budget we use to turn far-away countries into toilets and parking lots.

Funding my fellow countrymen who want to squander their lives, so long as they're doing so peacefully and in the privacy of their own homes? Sign. me. up.

Because all they care about is that people are given the opportunity? Your question is a complete non sequiter.

because of the multitude of positive effects it has on society that i live in. less depression, less poverty, less risky or criminal behavior, more economic activity, better educators, better medical care workers. this list can go on forever.

Even if you personally don't need or use the system today maybe it can be useful for you in the future.

> But most of my friends i met in this system ended up finding a job, despite being promised permanent "universal income".

So this experience stands against one of the most common arguments against basic income, "nobody is going to work anymore". It validates my belief that people will still seek purpose (and monetary rewards) even when their basic needs are fulfilled.

> I've heard this is to encourage people to work and I've heard (from the people who work in the system) that it's successful so far.

Always good to hear of policy that's actually working. At times, watching the news makes it feel like all of politics is just a smoke and mirrors game without any positive outcomes.

I feel like we already have tons of examples of people not really working for the money. CEOs of major companies typically have more than enough saved to just live indefinitely off the returns of that money. And yet, they don't.

Yeah. Open source software also kind of demonstrates this. Solving problems and producing value for others is a powerful motivator in itself.

While I'm hoping to see this system work I'm not sure if it will and whatnot. It's great to see research for it and maybe they can study some existing systems as well.

I feel a lot of people on here want to be or are already an entrepreneur. So of course your friends are most likely gonna start a business if they had the time, opportunity and safety net. But maybe that's enough?

Another thing I hear a lot from people in this system is saying they wish they had more money and wish they could do something to earn more. (But then again I think this is always the case)

The money we get is based on some average income. It's enough to pay the rent for an apartment, save up a little to buy a TV, maybe even a trip to another country if you're careful, etc.

I don't think it's enough to own a car, buy a house, have kids, etc. To live that kind of "dream" you need to find a full time job. Which sounds fair within the UBI context but maybe unfair if you're disabled. (I personally don't know, my own life is more than good at the moment)

I should have mentioned that there's a social stigma with not working (at least in Norway). Many of my disabled friends are not very open about it because they think it's embarrassing. I have one friend who choose to work at charity-ish place just so he can say he's working. He's 40 years old though and I believe the stigma was much stronger back in the past.

Personally if people ask what I'm doing I tell them that I'm disabled but I like programming, making music and so on. I've never had anyone react negatively to this, but this is face to face, first time we meet, and maybe the non disabled people I meet have similar mindset as me. (programmers, freelancers, artists, etc) The friends I have who are disabled is another friend circle entirely.

So I don't experience the stigma but I can imagine there are some people who don't like it of course. It's just that I don't hang around those people.

But this stigma could be an important factor as to why people want to work.

I feel like I'm talking for https://www.nav.no (the system in Norway I'm talking about). Maybe they have more useful (and more accurate) data for the people who research UBI.

You also have to look at the effect of UBI over generations. Children growing up with UBI may never see people close to them who do actual work. I once had a summer job at a welfare/employment agency. A lot of the people who received welfare in the second or third generation often had no idea how a job works. They were late all the time or just didn't show up for a week. The social worker had to explain to them how a job works.

I don't blame them. They just never had seen what people who have a job do. When I grew up everybody close to me was working so I could observe how a job works. And people who grow up around high-powered people like CEOs know how being a CEO works.

Hi, I’m someone who happened to both grow up on welfare AND watch zero people close to me work any sort of job ever.

Your comment reads to me as an implicit argument against UBI. Is that your case?

Allow to me comment from an insider perspective.

- The welfare money didn’t cause the lack of work. They were not strongly related or if anything it’s the lack of work that drives the need to take up welfare.

- It’s likely an extremely small minority of children in welfare-assisted families who see zero closely related adults working at all.

- People who grow up without working role models do have a harder time learning the ropes on the work life, on that we agree. That doesn’t mean they’re doomed to fail completely. (Saying this as someone who had no idea how to do this right but eventually learned, went through grad school, now works in tech, outearns the median income in her city, etc). Also how do you explain the many underemployed/unemployed/deadbeat kids of successful high-status parents? The connection seems rather spurious to me.

- Taking away the welfare money would do nothing to get someone employed. Instead it might endanger the family’s life. You realize that right?

I am not arguing against welfare or UBI. I am just saying the long-term effect may be different from what people are thinking. Especially at HN people seem to think all people on UBI will turn into artists or develop software all day. Maybe that will be the case but I have my doubts.

"People who grow up without working role models do have a harder time learning the ropes on the work life, on that we agree. That doesn’t mean they’re doomed to fail completely. "

People certainly can escape their upbringing but from my observation on average most people stay close to their social class. That doesn't mean that some won't do much better or much worse than their family.

The basic problem with welfare as it currently exists, is that it actually provides disincentives to working. If you start working they take away similar amounts of welfare. You'd have to get a job that is way more than the welfare for it to make even a little sense.

That disincentive goes away with UBI, which is the main reason I think it would work better. Under that system, every dollar you earn directly translates to a better standard of living.

I don't completely disagree with you. I personally know two 2nd-generation 'trustfunders' who many would say don't do much. That is, they 'just' do leisure work. One plays poker part time, and he volunteers the rest of his time. The other promotes bands that she likes. But, are they really doing nothing of value? I think many people who meet them are sort of envious: seems like a nice life!

I also know more than a few 1st-generation 'trustfunders'. Some are artists, some scientists, a couple work as university professors. They certainly are all doing useful work, right?

Just look at HN as a case study. There are many people here (myself included) who could live off of their savings indefinitely. In fact, I've tried a few times. But, as others have pointed out, sitting around doing nothing is dreadfully boring. Once one removes the usual daily stressors (e.g. being able to pay for rent, food, kids, etc.), escapist behavior quickly grows dull. Believe me, when not required to manage stress, there is only so much Netflix one can watch and only so many video games one can play.

I wouldn't worry about the vast majority of Humans doing nothing. People just do stuff. It just means changing perspective of what is valuable work. There are many types of work that are valuable to Humanity even if the market can't support them.

Edit: just want to add that I would be concerned by younger adult males forming gangs. Their PFC's aren't completely formed, and they have raging hormones. In Christian western countries, it's a common saying that "idle hands are the devil's workshop". And, I find that true. So, young adult males, with nothing to do and risk-taking brains, tend to get into trouble.

I wish technically-inclined people who could live off their savings would work on FOSS communication tools (e.g. FreedomBox, MatterMost, Matrix.org, Smallest Federated Wiki, or similar) to create viable alternatives to the centralized profit-driven communication and search systems created by venture capitalism. Or do whatever other worthwhile FOSS floats your boat like for educational simulations or whatever to be part of the gift economy. We desperately need alternatives -- and they are mostly not going to come from the surveillance capitalism culture (or its captive governance) which privatizes gains while socializing costs and risks (including costs and risks to privacy and democracy).

And non-technically-inclined people with savings could help by promoting, documenting distributing, training, prettifying, and providing other support for such systems.

And yes, I've put all my spare resources into that kind of FOSS technical work myself (although at the moment I'm once again working for pay to climb out of taking on debt to finish another FOSS project done with my wife -- this one called NarraFirma).

Related by Alan Kay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691 "In the interview -- to say it again -- I'm not calling for the field to implement my vision -- but I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it. Thoreau had a good line. He said "We become the tools of our tools" -- meaning, be very careful when you design tools and put them out for use. (Our consumer based technology field is not being at all careful.)"

See also "The Skills of Xanadu":

Printed: https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...

Audio: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08

And yes -- a Basic Income would make that possible for everyone someday. But if you can live that way now, why not help create a more joyful and sustainable alternative right now? Isn't it plausible that our direction coming out of any Singularity may have a lot to do with our moral and technical infrastructure going into one?

(Obviously, there are some paying jobs that align more closely with such ideals, but they tend to be few and far between, and if you have savings and take one, you displace someone else who might not have your options.)

Personally I don't believe in idea that many people would be able to build successful FOSS projects and communities around them while living off their savings. It's could be a good for the start, but nothing would work without project having viable business model like MatterMost or Discourse have. Or if someone sponsors it be it some corporation or individual.

Reason for this is simple: successful project it's not just the code, but also community around it. Coordinating even small team across different time zones, helping new contributors, reviewing the code and keeping it all together is exhausting daily job and not everyone can handle that. Now projects that you find valuable would require highly skilled programmer to work on them.

So the person it's require to build such software can easily find a job in one of corporations that pay very well or FOSS-related job that might have lesser pay. Why should someone prefer to live off savings or in debt just to build software that don't have business model?

This is the reason I don't think basic income would help here at all. Of course some could be okay in living just above poverty while working on project they believe in, but most would prefer job for some corporation that would have have 3-10 times better pay.

So instead of basic income there should be viable way to fund open source projects and to distribute the pay fairly according to the job done. For individuals and small teams there is already Patreon, but there no simple solution for distributed teams usual open source project have because it's extremely hard to collect and distribute the money without offending someone or contributors lose motivation to work on project when one guy is being paid while they get nothing. Unfortunately I don't even sure if ever will be solution for this.

I agree anyone competent enough to run a good FOSS project from their savings will face a daily temptation of abandoning their precarious existence for a substantial secure income working at a corporate job. And I agree also that it is problematical how to divide donations to a project when there are multiple contributors (especially versus donations to specific developers, but even that is problematic if a multi-person project is involved). I also agree on the need for building a community around a project.

Where we differ regarding the BI and FOSS is possibly in thinking in these areas:

* There are many small but important projects (Mithril, Vue, many others -- even Linux early on) which are initially the work of one developer, eventually supported by a community. A BI would make more such starts possible, and also make contributions more feasible. While it is not quite "if you build it, they will come", certainly there are a lot of cases where a good project, well supported by one person, makes a big difference to a lot of people. Khan Academy in its early years is another great example of this.

* There is an entire gift economy of volunteerism. In some ways, much economic activity in even the USA is voluntary (even if it is ignored in the GDP) when you consider child care, helping neighbors, volunteering at non-profits, conversing with strangers to share knowledge, and so on. So, I know it is possible.

* Regarding "most people" and "some people": If you multiple seven billion people on the planet times even 0.1% of people being civic-minded at any particular time (and the percentage is probably much higher), then you get 7 million people. That is still a lot of people who can put a lot of time into things. And even without a BI, Clay Skirky said, there is a lot of time that could be liberated for improving free software and free content: https://web.archive.org/web/20110102193349/http://www.shirky... "Two hundred billion hours [of TV watching], in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus."

The bottom line is that the way people make a lot of money is by standing between someone and something they want and asking for a toll to access that thing. Almost all venture business models are based on some variation of that (or aspire to that such rent seeking). It's not the only way to make money, but it is the way to make a lot of money. The problem is that tolls have lots of external costs. For tolls at bridges there are delays, health costs of fumes, and increased risks of accidents. For online software, there is the externality of lost privacy (but only one-way, consumer to aggregator) needed to make possible the tolls Google and Facebook charge advertisers as they sell human eyeballs. There is also the externality of risks from central points of failure (whether loss of service or censorship).

Small-scale exchange commerce may make a lot of capitalistic sense at the scale of, say, running a local farm, bagel shop, or plumbing company. But on a large scale, like Facebook, Google, Slack, and so on, the centralization of control of information flows poses enormous risks to democracy.

If there was not so much regulatory capture, we might expect our governments to pour literally trillions of dollars a year into software (and content) for democracy right now given how important that is. Instead we have a proprietary centralized Facebook, Google, Twitter, and even Windows -- and our democracy and culture is at great risk from an imbalance of power. Governments at the behest of content publishers have continually expanded copyright and passed ever more draconian laws about sharing information. And every day we get more funding pouring into the next venture (like Slack) that can figure out how to capture and centralize more information and data mine it for the benefit of the investors.

For a latest example of how Slack continues to invest in data minining alll the secrets of coprorations: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/starting-up-slack-s-search-le...

As we move into an age of AI, the emphasis on monopolistic business models is even more dangerous. It's bad enough to have a communications system shaped by short-term greed and competition -- it is far, far worse to have autonomous inhuman AIs shaped by short-term greed and competition let loose on the net.

I wrote an essay relate to such funding trends over a decade ago, with a section on automotive intelligence: http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#w...

Of course, ultimately, there are lots of moral failures all around. If people had rejected Facebook or Slack from the start, the world online might be a very different place.

But, in the words of Marc Zuckerberg: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

  Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
  Zuck: Just ask
  Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
  [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
  Zuck: People just submitted it.
  Zuck: I don't know why.
  Zuck: They "trust me"
  Zuck: Dumb fucks

Now, we all need to trust other people in this world to have a happy life. But in a democracy, the idea is to spread that trust around as much as is feasible and have checks and balances. There is also the notion of incrementally earned trust -- and also the recall of trust (like impeachment).

But how do we impeach Facebook, Slack, Google, or Equifax? In our society, we can't. The best we can do is create alternatives.

Instead of centralized proprietary services like Facebook or Slack, we could instead have shared standards (e.g. email, IRC, or what comes next) and a variety of implementers of those standards. But if all the techies are being paid by VC to work for Facebook or Slack or the next similar service, that creates a vacuum of developers working on better email or better IRC standards (and implementations).

We may benefit from some hierarchy, but we also benefit from having that mixed with some meshwork (as Manuel De Landa suggests: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm ).

There are several options for moving forward -- a Basic Income is just one of them. Maybe there can be better business models that affirm democracy. And maybe there can be more court rulings protecting democracy. And maybe there can be more collective investment by government and foundations in FOSS. (One other place I suggest that is here, suggesting the intelligence community fund FOSS intelligence tools: http://web.archive.org/web/20160508005451/http://pcast.ideas... ) But we may not get there if we believe a conventional rent-seeking business model is the only way to fund most software and communication services.

While I wish to be as positive as you are about the future there still few points I feel important to make.

* First of all I don't think that important projects started by single developer is right example for benefit that BI could bring because they managed without basic income in past and they don't need it today.

If project don't get enough traction during period when project originator actively work on it that's usually mean that will never happen. But if original developer leave there still chance for someone else who believe in idea to take control or just fork it and continue. Also this rotation seems like one of crucial parts that make open source successful.

So while BI would let someone to work on the same code indefinitely or at least much longer than now I don't think that will greatly increase number of popular and widely used open source projects. And who knows might be it's will even decrease that number.

* Another note about voluntarism. It's great that in developed countries there is endless number of ways for society to participate in all kind of useful activities and I wish it's was even remotely close in country of my origin. Though for the reasons stated before I simply don't believe that crowd-sourcing can be applied to build successful software projects. You might say that community can go promote software instead of helping with development, but today you can't even promote project efficiently using centralized tools we have simply because companies companies like Facebook and others want you to pay for that. Number of communities outside of centralized social networks is dwindle over last 10 years.

So I wish to think positively, but so far all I see is that distributed FOSS projects cannot successfully compete with corporate or VC funded products. With direction where Internet, hardware trends, Internet and society itself going I don't see how we going to get more people involved in open source and not less.

But hopefully someone will come up with idea how to fund truly distributed open source teams so they can at least somewhat compete with VC money burning centralized proprietary alternatives. Without that best we can hope for is that open source will keep positions it's have today.

A basic income makes it possible for, say, 100 software developers to choose to work together on the same project of their own choosing and of their own free will -- as opposed to having to work for someone else on someone else's choice of project just to be able to pay for food and rent. That's the difference a BI would make.

Now, getting 100 software developers top agree to work together on the same project might not be easy ("herding cats"). But it seems doable, as we can point to quite a few projects (including big names like Linux, WordPress, Apache, and Python) where it has happened. And there are even some books out there on how to create and manage FOSS projects.

Granted, those particular big-name projects have also had commercial support eventually -- so we don't know all the details of what might be possible otherwise. But there are plenty of examples of voluntary groups of significant size dedicated to a common purpose (fire companies, sports clubs, historical societies, and so on) so it is not inconceivable the same will continue to happen for software if people have the free time to participate in them.

I just don't buy that even if basic income implemented properly it's would provide enough money so skilled programmers would go work on their dream project instead of getting full-time job with good pay. Being just a bit above poverty with food and rent is simply not enough.

I know many people who would say it's would be great, but I sure that wouldn't looks so great in practice. If average salary of developer is going to be multiple times above BI the only people who going to stay out of full time job would likely be useless due to their poor skills or inability to work in team.

I saying that from my own experience: I almost left doing my boring freelance stuff to learn C++ and work on project I want to see finished. I still keep doing it because I like it, but living without money is not fun. And I'm crazy Russian guy who used to see poverty all around, but I absolutely don't see how people who used to get at least $70,000/year salary in EU / US would go change it to something like $40,000/year BI.

Also I can't say much about Apache or Python, but other two examples are wrong. Linux become actually successful after corporations backed it while WordPress have massive business behind it: Automattic has 500+ employees and way above 1B valuation.

Participating projects in free time might work for some software, but most of time there is group of lead developers who doing most of heavy lifting and projects wouldn't live without them. And there plenty of extremely boring, but very important work that is critical for security and project integrity, but can't be really crowd sourced at all.

PS: Though I should note that I'm proponent of BI and I feel it would work great as replacement for traditional ineffective welfare systems that either useless or too easy to abuse (I seen plenty of it while lived in the UK). And I sure that BI could give indirect benefit for the society in general, but I don't believe it's what's needed to push FOSS forward.

I watched the development and later commercialization of all four of those. I even contributed a bit like by getting Python approved inside IBM Research for internal use around 1999 back when using "Open Source" software was a novel idea to many companies, and I also tried to popularize Linux a bit inside IBM Research at the time.

Linux and WordPress were both started with one or two people, and it was years before a lot of corporate money jumped onboard after they were starting to show success. It took thousands of people who cared about FOSS quietly lobbying for it in the companies they worked for (as I did at IBM Research) and also others to turn that interest into companies like Cygnus and RedHat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress "WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg[1] and Mike Little,[9] as a fork of b2/cafelog."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic "Automattic, Inc. is a web development corporation founded in August 2005."

On the commercialization of Linux and how it took coordinated effort to promote it before companies adopted it: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/02/03/0039223/commercial... which references: https://web.archive.org/web/20020206225729/http://www.linuxw...

I understand this BI approach may not work for you right now. It may not even work for most software developers right now.

But, as a counter example, there are about eleven million graduate students in the world, many living on about a Basic Income level of funding. That is proof that millions of people are willing to live for years at poverty level wages (or even taking on debt) in order to do something they care about -- even if quite a few could get jobs paying a lot more by pursuing more immediate commercial success. Granted many may aspire to a better paying job as a tenured professor, but any look at the statistics show that is not going to happen for 90%+ of such students. Most of these people in graduate programs are generally not there because they are "useless due to their poor skills or inability to work in [a] team." http://www.richardprice.io/post/12855561694/the-number-of-ac...

See also: "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet" by Micky Z. From the book blurb: "Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors’ essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."

=== A tangent on what I want to do, making public intelligence tools for civic sensemaking, and how a BI could help

Here is a different path to a similar place instead of a BI, but it is much less compatible with our current economic system: :-) https://web.archive.org/web/20090219001429/http://whywork.or... "It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. ..."

As I see it, 99% of commercial programming every year is not needed -- and worse, just makes work for other programmers supporting poorly implemented redundant garbage code. Really, how many accounting systems do we need? How many online shopping systems? How many medical records systems? How many email systems? How many EDI standards? How many programming languages? How many OSs? How many libraries for basic embedded control tasks?

I'm all for diversity and experiment and playfulness and for everyone who wants to learning to code and writing their own applications, languages, and OSes for fun and self-education and even some personal security in knowing for sure what the code they use does because they wrote it. But, at the same time, as I see it, almost all commercial programming done today is completely unneeded (or 100X harder than it should be) compared to if we had a few solid agreed upon standards that were well thought out and implemented in FOSS and maintained in a cooperative way which supported flexible adaptation. (See Alfie Kohn and "The Case Against Competition").

But we have the mess we do because of vast amounts of commercial competition introducing vast inefficiencies into the software development process because programmers were not allowed by their companies to cooperate and coordinate with other programmers in different organizations. For example, Microsoft sabotaged the web and JavaScript for along time via "embrace, extend, and extinguish". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

Are we really that much better off now as software developers than when people were, say, running Rexx under an IBM VM in the 1980? http://www.rexxla.org/rexxlang/mfc/rexxadv.html Or, better even, using Smalltalk? https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

For example, in my opinion, most application software has gone downhill since Smalltalk-80 and the 1990 version of "Analyst"... :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.smalltalk/... "... The Analyst Spreadsheet (which was also sold as a separate package) was simply the best. Cells could contain arbitrary Smalltalk objects, and formula were arbitrary Smalltalk code. When we showed people things like image manipulation within spreadsheet cells or computing inverses of matrices containing fractions and/or complex numbers, they often could not believe what they saw :-) ..."

I'm trying to recreate that sort of thing two decades later in JavaScript as FOSS in my spare time from descriptions... And more, perhaps crossed with HyperCard, Augment, Thunderbird, a Federated Wiki, Diaspora, Matrix.org, MatterMost, SEAS, Angler, IBIS, and a Semantic Desktop. My latest version exploring some ideas (still a long way to go): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7

I am doing it for these sorts of reasons: http://web.archive.org/web/20160508005451/http://pcast.ideas... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

Also related: "Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691

I've worked on successful commercial and governmental intelligence systems before so it as not quite as far-fetched a stretch for me to do that as it might seem. But I still need to earn a living, so it has to be a spare time thing right now. With a BI for everyone in my family (so, BI x N), I could have been doing that full time (or at least, a lot more than now) for many years -- rather than my current pattern of earning money working for others to to buy my own free time to do such projects.

So, imagine 100 dedicated programmers willing to live on a BI to make something like that that happen. It might be an organization similar in spirit to, say, Project Vote Smart (but without as much drama or a physical site) which has 40 lowly-paid interns (again showing there are people willing to make that financial tradeoff): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vote_Smart https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Project-Vote-Smart-Intern-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Project-Vote-Smart-Salaries...

Sure, maybe you would not want to be part of such an effort yourself today. But with a BI, I feel there might be enough people working on it to make a real difference while having a lot of "hard fun" along the way -- people who choose to participate in civic ventures and who would finally have the time to volunteer since they have a BI. And then maybe the result will be the next Linux/WordPress/Apache/Python/etc.. Of course, odds are any specific such project would fail -- or even if it succeeds, it would be ignored. But if enough people can do the same using the free time a BI provides, eventually one such project will be a success, just like for every Linux there were probably 1000s of people playing around with starting their own OSs that never went anywhere. And if our economic system still exists in its current form then, likely companies will come along to commercialize that success and expand on it, same as with Linux.

Of course, without a BI such a project is still possible, in the way Project Vote Smart is possible (via volunteerism and interns and small grants), or Linux or Python or even the early Web got built in people's spare time until finding organizations that supported the main developer for long-term full-time work, or Mozilla exists (for at least another couple of years), or the Chandler Project existed for a time. It was unfortunate to see Mozilla waste literally hundreds of millions of US dollars that could have gone to a FOSS project like this for organizing information (including web content, search results, and email). And it was also saddening to watch the Chandler Project spend millions on an information organizer with not much to show for it and then dissolve -- but at least their heart was in the right place and with 10X to 100X more time and more funding they might have succeeded after going up some painful learning curves. But sometimes it just takes many failures before a success (part of the theory of Y Combinator, for example).

A good resource by Karl Fogel on: "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" http://producingoss.com/

Thanks. Interesting read!

Supporting your third paragraph, I had some contact with the unschooling movement while growing up. The experience is typically that kids will do nothing for a while. Maybe quite a while. But then they get bored, and start to pursue things they find interesting. Art, music, literature, science, programming. You sort of need to detox from living under a very defined structure before you learn to self direct and spend time doing things you enjoy. It also seems possible that this transition could become more difficult as people age. Intuitively that makes sense to me, and might partially explain why some adults have a hard time transitioning into retirement.

So... would there be still risks in giving basic income to females?

I think you're right at least to the extent that this complicates drawing conclusions. Another issue I see is that in this study we're talking about a single household in a likely poor community getting a basic income. This is totally different from a scenario where the recipient knows that everyone else in their community is receiving a basic income too. Imagine this: a woman in a poor community who works a low-paying job starts receiving a basic income. Her boyfriend loses his job, and he starts to rely on her for support. In a world where both parties have a basic income, she'd have an easier time eventually telling him he needs to get out on his own feet, but in this scenario, she's the one with this "extra money."

And what about border policy? You can't have open border policy + UBI together... I mean why not try to come to America then. I would I come if I had a chance to get UBI and live there, and millions, millions of others. Would the system still work?

I think you mis-understand UBI. UBI enables 'survival' within the country. It will just about pay for a room and basic food. You want to eat steak, you will need to get a job.

Good luck restricting that from future generations who will vote for more largesse...

People regularly vote to cut government entitlements. See healthcare funding in Canada which still does not cover prescription drugs or dental care.

UBI is going to be treated just the same as a tax break for the poor and likely to stay at very minimal levels.

Look at social spending rates by government over time. It's typical that they rise, despite attempts to restrain them. Critics call attempts to slow the growth rate "cuts" and paint the reformers as heartless.

Because people lack gratitude for the life we have. (including me) No generation before has been so prosperous or lived so long, healthy lives. Now how do you solve that problem?

Richer society's can support higher standards of government spending. So IMO, the only metric that matters in Government spending is per person spending / per person GDP.

And in that context you see various growth and cuts over time.

However, even that is misleading as richer society's have a higher percentage of discretionary income and may be willing to pay higher tax rates.

Higher "standards" of spending? Is that the new liberal euphemism for higher taxes? Richer societies can spend more dollars, but percentage wise, there's obviously a limit. We'll find out in the next 20 or so years as the amount we spend on social services crowds out all other spending, and we can't pay back the principal on our existing debt.

Sorry, I mean if you keep the percentage of taxes the same you end up with more money. That often changes the perception of reasonable expenses. Police forces for example are often better equipped in wealthy areas. The high school football field may have better bleachers ect.

Nobody thinks it's important to add street lights in the middle of corn fields. But, cities have had various forms of lighting over time and increasing standards for lighting levels from the 1400's to now. US street lights for example could be perfectly useful for walking if they where 1/10 as bright as they currently are which would significantly reduce associated costs.

Historically, rates where vastly lower. But, people also got vastly fewer benefits from the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_medieval_England So, YMMV.

PS: Anyway, if inflation adjusted medium income was say 10x as much I could see people tolerating 70% tax rates as their take home pay would still be significantly higher than we have. AKA if average person make 500,000$ in inflation adjusted dollars then they might be ok with an after tax take home pay of just 150,000$ / year on average. But say government provided self driving cars and underground tunnel networks.

No I did not. Doesn't it come as obvious that people start asking for equal treatment? Or you just build new barriers and second class citizens.

If USA would pay UBI I would do my best to somehow become citizen, there is no reason for me why I shouldn't try. And there are over 7 billion people on the planet, I'm not the only one who thinks that way. That is why I raised the question of borders/immigration + UBI. It's very different situation when it is now for illegals and also people who want to become citizens.

On the other hand, since you're not going to be the only one with this line of thinking, it will create a potentially large incentive for other countries to establish their own UBI to prevent a "brain drain". (It wouldn't totally eliminate the draw of the USA's UBI, though, since foreign UBIs would likely be lower.)

Presumably any UBI system would be limited to citizens only.

In combination with open borders, you do risk having a class system, where the citizens have money and immigrants don't, but at the same time, it solves the issue of certain jobs not being worth the time of someone who gets UBI (and therefore being for immigrants).

It's a tough balance for sure, and one of the main arguments against UBI (accidental creation of a class system).

again showing that socialism causes division and tribalism. i dont want to give more money (currently near half my earnings) to the top 1% of the world (any american on minimum wage) over the current global charities I give to

If the government guarantees a basic income, you're really only guaranteed (at best) until the next election cycle. Just recently, seven years after its passing, the ACA was nearly reverted, which would have kicked millions of people off government-subsidized health insurance plans.

Also, similar to the ACA, individual states can attempt to block the roll-out.

That's why I have approximately 0 faith in the pension plan my government(s) have in place. I'll save for my own retirement so I'm not high and dry when they mismanage the funds or change policies or whatever.

While it is less likely, nothing is guaranteed. You assume your investments will be around until you cash them out for retirement, and they are all dependant on something not failing:

* Direct stock ownership depends on the company growing, not failing, not being bought out, etc. * Mutual funds depend on the fund manager not going under / properly managing assets. * Bonds depend on state institutions honoring them. * You can't really save for retirement in a bank because their rates of return are below inflation. You lose money in banks. * Hoarding fiat is obviously bad. * Any asset you would try to store long term is subject to market volatility at the least and potential obsolescence at the worst. You simply cannot guess what anything will be worth decades from now.

The current US administration knows full well that throwing tens of millions of people off insurance will probably cost them the disenfranchised working class that elected them in the first place and lose them their majorities in congress and the presidency. I fully expect them to stab themselves in the foot with this, since a lot of monied interests benefit from the absurdly inefficient default state of healthcare where many people depend on emergency rooms for all problems, but in the same vein repealing social security would destroy their voting base unless they made it a grandfathered in shutdown where the next Democratic administration could just reinstate it and nobody on benefits would lose benefits.

>Mutual funds depend on the fund manager not going under / properly managing assets.

Err, no. This is not a risk of properly structured mutual funds. The manager does not directly hold assets - they make decisions about what to do with the assets, which the custodian executes. And the fund's management has no recourse to the assets held by the custodian. How the fund goes under is if the assets they hold go to zero value.

There's still execution risk, though, which is why passive management is ideal. I'm pretty sure VTSAX can successfully hold a market-cap weighted mix of the 3600 largest US firms pretty much indefinitely. The risk is that the largest US firms stop being generally profitable, like what happened in Japan.

Which is also _another_ reason UBI is a terrible idea that is bound to fail.

In the case of BI, I disagree. Politicians will see this for what it really is -- the most direct way to buy votes (by promising increased BI). It would be quite popular with both parties, I'm sure.

One party's platform is built on the fear of socialism - they will most definitely oppose this and use it to get votes, but by egging it publicly.

If we're living in a world where BI is a reality, it will be embraced. Once social programs are implemented, they're nearly impossible to remove -- see ObamaCare. Republicans have given up on going back to the old system and have, well, embraced a tweaked ObamaCare under a new name. They'd do the same with BI.

"Democrats promising $30K BI? Well we're gonna do $35K!"

This is circular logic. In order for BI to become a reality, it first must be embraced. In order for BI to be embraced, it must first be a world where BI is a reality.

You keep referencing ACA, but there is currently a new bill to repeal it: https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/06822f49-...

The argument from the parent posts rely on ACA being repealed already. If the ACA does get repealed then the above arguments hold but this hasn't happened yet.

My point is that bringing up the ACA repeal is moot, either way, because it's repeal is still active and not finished.

No, in order for BI to become a reality you just need a Democrat majority to pass the legislation.

The irony of course being that all the existing social programs which are "nearly impossible to remove" will have to be removed to fund the BI.

BI is the opposite of socialism when it's coupled with dismantling certain pieces of the social safety net. We don't need WIC or CHIP if we have universal BI, for example.

That depends on a great deal of factors, I think.

Even if we guarantee some sort of income floor, there will still be those who, despite that guarantee, need additional assistance. Whether it's because they have more children than the average, are irresponsible with spending, are victim to a drug habit, unexpectedly lose their jobs, or succumb to medical debt, we have to come to grips with the idea that UBI won't be a cure-all.

Even if we acknowledge (and not all will) that most people who are dependent on safety-net assistance are perfectly good and responsible, depending on what the amount is, what their life circumstances are, and a myriad other factors, I don't think we can take it for granted that UBI obviates those specific-purpose programs for the remainder of those who need assistance and for whom UBI is not ideal.

Put bluntly, there are people who will take the entirety of their UBI check and spend it on stupid things, and end up without money for food, or for their childrens' health. What are we to do about them?

Yes, BI involves dismantling certain pieces of the social safety net to replace it with a social safety net. The party that opposes wealth redistribution will oppose BI.

I think you're confusing the GOP's motivations and their rhetoric. See also: their failure to repeal the ACA despite having the presidency and a majority in both houses.

That's because the GOP isn't a party, it's a coalition of bickering factions that has chosen to prioritize winning over purity. (As opposed to Democrats, who prioritize purity over winning.)

Odd, I would have flipped that statement.

Tbe republican party like UBI if it comes with a reduction in welfare programs. Its the democrats that have to be convinced.

Pensions are a great use-case for smart contracts. I would feel much safer having my retirement assured by a blockchain than a bureaucrat.

How would this work? As I understand it pensions are almost never fully funded when they begin because the costs would be prohibitive. Can a smart contract guarantee that funds that are not available now will be made available at a later date?

It wouldn't work, almost nothing people want to do with smart contract can actually work because those people tend not to actually understand what a smart contract is or what it can actually do and what it can't do. Virtually every smart contract proposal is DOA due to a misunderstanding of their nature.

What's missing from your claim is any justification for it all. You're just claiming, on zero authority, that it's not possible. So enlighten us.

Why do you think it's impossible to encode the mechanics of a pension in a smart contract-based system?

I didn't need to, the comment I replied to already addressed a valid why. Smart contracts can't enforce access to funds without locking the funds up from other use, and that's not how things work in the real world. Pensions aren't savings accounts where funds are locked up ready to be used in a black box. They can't interact with the real world without trusted oracles, but we already have that in the real world and they're only real use is when they can do something deterministic on chain. In short, they're largely hype without a real problem to solve... so far.

You're just claiming it's impractical today, not technically infeasible for any reason.

1. Pensions don't currently work like this

There are many thousands of different pension systems across the world.

It stands to reason that you could create new system, and if it had significantly attractive advantages, people would use it.

2. Trusted oracles are a problem

Yup, we need more decentralized services that smart contracts can take advantage of. Wait a few years, they're coming.

3. Smart contracts are only useful for deterministic changes

Making deterministic change is precisely what you want. Do you mean statically defined? Because that's obviously not correct. And are you considering a new system specifically designed for pensions?

Virtually all innovative technology is "hype" until it isn't. I agree we have a ways to go.

Hence my final words, so far...

> Making deterministic change is precisely what you want.

Yes, but that's a problem when you have to interact with the real world which isn't.

To the extent they are funded, that money could never be rescinded. And you could negotiate early funding as a feature now, because it would actually mean something to the recipients. There are no untrustworthy promises required.

And you could do new things based on control of your pension, which might radically change how we think of them.

The main thing that smart contracts remove is the need for trust. And that's the main problem with pensions.

Better yet, one could have completely private pension plans, where everyone is safe from both bureaucrats and kleptocrats.

Congratulations, you've just invented the IRA.

It's not completely private if bureaucrats tell you what you can or cannot do with it, as well as when you may do it, stealing from you if you step outside of their rules.

Completely private accounts are called savings accounts; governments aren't telling you what to do with your money, they're telling you what you have to do in order to avoid that money being taxed, IRA's offer you a benefit, that benefit isn't without strings. Smart contracts offer nothing here you can't already do easier.

Using a broad definition of theft merely serves to raise the noise floor. Your definition of "completely private" seems like "free markets" or "perfect competition": that is, things which are free from government interference only in misanthropic delusions. As Jefferson explained, stable ownership is not a natural concept; that you are considered to "own" things absent direct physical possession is a function of society. We also collectively agree to believe in this thing called 'money', which is also not an inherent property of mankind. That society can dictate rights and rules about property is inherent to the concept of each.

The "smart contract" is still reacting to things in the real world. It's not going to magically cause the stock market to not fail. And, as we've seen, they are vulnerable to hacking.

It doesn't magically solve all problems, just the most important one. Trust.

How?

You don't have to trust anyone with access to your pension not to steal from it, because no one has access to it.

The promise that is your pension would be cryptographically enshrined in a blockchain, with full transparency.

That's... that's not really true. For one, we've already seen how these "smart contracts" can be hacked. I can almost guarantee that they will put something in them that will allow them to take the stuff back.

And that hasn't really explained how the funding would be there.

Actually, the fact that it hasn't been unrolled completely yet without backlash is a testament to how angry people are when you try to take their protections away.

I think you are right but for the wrong reasons.

The whole point about Basic Income (at least the unconditionally one) is that there are not going to be any jobs (or very few and only for highly talented people). And even if there are jobs it will always be worthwhile working (as long as it's unconditional)

So if you, like me, believe that's the case, the whole discussion about whether people want to take a job or not becomes moot. It doesn't matter if they would have, they can't.

A much more important discussion then becomes how we make it work financially.

The whole point about Basic Income (at least the unconditional ly one) is that there are not going to be any jobs (or very few and only for highly talented people).

If there are no jobs, it will be because we designed it that way, not because it was inevitable. Tech giants proposing basic income as the solution to their lazy lack of desire to figure out how to better distribute work tell glowing stories of how lovely it will be for low paid workers to get this extra money. They never actually explore the scenario they are actually proposing that all you get is $10k-$20k and you have little or no hope of getting a job at all ever again.

That would be a dystopian nightmare and I think it is likely to end in bloody revolution.

Lots of hopeless people with nothing but time on their hands who are being completely fucked over by the system with no way out of this black hole but just enough money to keep eating well, even if they are living in a tent, sounds like a recipe for creating a well trained guerrilla army.

I wish it was that simple.

Technology isn't inevitable but to the extent that we wan't to reap the benefits of it is. In other word, we aren't designing anything other than our own replacements.

With regards to how SV tries to paint it thats a different discussion and have nothing to do with whether it will happen or not.

It doesn't have to be dystopian (ex. Post scarcity society) but until we get there it's going to be worse not better for a lot of people.

But I would challenge you to come up with an alternative that by and large at least compete with the reliance on technology.

The problem is that no specific part of the whole system is responsible and everyone in the system is more or less acting rationally.

So I fundamentally disagree it's not inevitable (with the above context considered)

But I would challenge you to come up with an alternative

Actually, I have. I was homeless for nearly six years until earlier this month. I am medically handicapped and can't work a regular job. I was a homemaker for a lot of years, I had a corporate job for a few years and I currently do freelance writing, resume editing and I blog, which gets me a little money via ads, tips and Patreon.

UBI will solve nothing as long as we do not have universal basic health care and affordable housing. If we establish universal basic health care and create sufficient affordable housing, then the last piece of the puzzle is redistributing work. We did this once before under very similar circumstances where automation was "taking our jobs."

It was called The Industrial Revolution. It gave birth to the 40 hour work week, overtime pay and unions.

If work is structured properly and you can get a cheap SRO or similar somewhere and not have to worry about medical bills, you can cover your basic living expenses working part time. If it is well structured where you work as little or as much as you want, then people who are unambitious hedonists or who have personal burdens, like chronic health issues, can just get by without it being a dystopian horrifying black hole that seems inescapable. Folks with more energy and/or more ambition can work harder and do more with their lives.

I have written a number of pieces laying out the details. Some are listed on this page of my old blog:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html

But I don't imagine you are actually interested. That "challenge" was most likely intended to mean "Shut up. It isn't like you have a solution."

You are assuming an awful lot of things about me. Why would I challenge you if I wasn't intersted in what you had to say?

You completely ignore that there is no need to structure work if I don't have to hire people to produce or develop my products. This is the whole point and why I believe you are fundamentally looking at this wrong.

The industrial revolution replaced physical work, this revolution is replacing intellectual work.

You are betting on some political/ideological/moral change in people, not actually addressing the points I was making.

And, yet, your out of hand dismissal fits very well with my assumption that you aren't actually interested in hearing a solution other than UBI.

I am not betting on a political, ideological or moral change. Whether we establish a UBI or go with something akin to my above proposals, these are equally political solutions. Neither will happen without a great many people working to make it happen.

The only question is what kind of future do we want? I think UBI makes no sense and will not work. Universal basic health care would be vastly easier to implement, if only because it has already be done in multiple other countries, so we have models to borrow from. Yet, people think that is a bridge too far and will not happen.

So, to me, the good news is that UBI is unlikely to happen and Gig Work is already on the rise, such as Uber, writing services and delivery services. The challenge here is just getting the word out that such services need to be a win-win scenario for both company and workers.

I am already living this reality. Gig Work has been an ideal solution in the face of a medical situation that makes a normal job not work for me. So, I know firsthand that Gig Work can be a terrific option for the worker if it isn't designed to screw over the little guy.

That can totally coexist alongside factories with very few workers. The rise of the machines does not have to be a terrible thing for humanity. The Industrial Revolution raised standards of living and quality of life across the board. There is no reason The Second Industrial Revolution cannot do the same.

But we do need to set that as a goal and work towards it. My only real concern is that, currently, some very rich and powerful people do not see the 99 percent as actual human beings. They see them as sheeple. And the solutions that grow out of such contempt tend to be self fulfilling prophesies that force powerless people into the narrative imposed on them from high.

What out of hand dismissal?

I am intersted in hearing actual solutions not wishful thinking based on the idea that humans decide themselves when we obviously don't.

If you want to argue that then I have already asked you how that would happen given the reality we live in.

Gig-work will also be replaced by technology either through digitalization or automation.

95% of jobs created since 2010 are temp jobs i.e. part of the gig-economy, that's obviously not sustainable as there isn't any rise in salaries while as I said the cost of living is rising.

So again unless you believe that technology is not going to take the jobs

Calling it wishful thinking is incredibly dismissive and contemptuous.

If you were genuinely interested, you could read the multiple articles I have already written and linked to. I don't think you have bothered to do that.

I see no reason to engage further.

I agree with you that tech giants promoting basic income are probably only doing that as an easy and attractive answer to - what will happen to all the jobs?

However, I really don't think UBI is the answer. I don't understand where the money will come from/who will do the leftover work. I think we should continue to cultivate an innovative society and new types of jobs - more appealing I think - will be created.

People that rich are used to solving certain things by whipping out their checkbook (so to speak). It may be superficially well meaning, but, no, I don't think UBI actually works. If they manage to get a UBI instituted, I think that is a case of the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But, the odds seem pretty long against it being instituted in this country at all. So, that makes me feel it is mere posturing.

I do a lot of "light one candle rather than curse the dark" type projects. I try to promote things that already exist (like gig work) that I think work. I do my best to get such info into the hands of people who seem hardest hit by the societal growing pains we are witnessing.

It can be hard to measure the results of such efforts and it can be outright impossible to prove to others that it makes a difference. But, I have had experiences* that convince me that it does make a difference, so I persist.

* http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

But what are you basing that belief on? Thats what I would like to know. Unless you don't think computers will be able to do most of the things that create fundamental value in society. Of course you can imagine all sorts of services on top (prostitution, games etc) but the idea of the job market as something that we just keep creating new jobs for is simply not backed by reality.

What fundamentally new jobs have we really seen the last 100 years besides computer engineer and how many people does that industry actually occupy. As it turns out not a lot.

Everything else is just a more refined version of things that already existed in some form or another and rapidly being replaced by technology.

> But what are you basing that belief on?

Which part of it? Not too many generations ago, many people lived entirely off the land. A large portion of people's "jobs" were displaced from agriculture and yet over time new jobs keep getting created. There are jobs that no one had even thought of that are now providing for the livelihood of many people.

Yes I believe there will also be new things that people want and new ways that other want to help them get it that will keep fueling the economy. There are things that are inaccessible to many people now that will become more everyday and "middle class".

> Unless you don't think computers will be able to do most of the things that create fundamental value in society.

No not at all. Of course I think automation can keep getting better but there are plenty of jobs that I don't see computers doing anywhere in the near term - building a house, paving a street, cooking food, being a nurse, being a garbage man, etc etc.

> What fundamentally new jobs have we really seen the last 100 years besides computer engineer...

Um seriously? I know people who literally are "social media managers". I know people who sell eBooks for a living or do Youtube. I know folks who attempt to at least live off the music they make.

These are just "new" jobs that no one could have envisioned before. But think of all the greater demand there could be existing jobs. I have a friend in Fiji and apparently there nearly everyone has a housekeeper, even "middle class" people. There is a demand for stuff like that even in America - people keep pushing toward whatever improves their standard of living as long as they can afford it.

Technology is growing fast but its far from the only thing desired by people.

New jobs keeps getting created simply because the markets have grown through population growth and globalization. If you look in the US out of all the new jobs created since 2009 95% of them are temp jobs not structural jobs. Temp jobs means that the job is being perceived as less valuable (no healthcare) than ex a structurally solid job. The actual market value of most jobs is diminishing. At the same time cost of living is going up up up.

The jobs no one have thought of are literally a drop in the ocean. They pay a few people very well while 90% don't make a dime on them. And they are only "new jobs" in the sense that they are about a new medium or technology. But fundamentally nothing new about them.

The problem with most jobs is that they don't actually require the whole human only a small part of the humans abilities. Unless you don't think technology can replace that function I have a hard time seeing where you get your view that it's not an actual problem from.

Technology allow you to be competitive which mean you need to keep investing in technology to be competitive. Yet income is actually declining and cost is going up.

Here is an interesting graph showing price change:

https://twitter.com/hnshah/status/909557796873662464/photo/1

How is that an illustration of things becoming more accessible? Unless of course you mean that TV series covers people fundamental needs.

Yet there are already technologies doing that today. This will only increase over time.

Um seriously? I know people who literally are "social media managers"

Social media manager are just marketing people in another medium nothing new there. Selling ebooks is just selling books in another media. these aren't actually new types of jobs and it's a very very very small fraction of society who actually make a living from these. You can't live on likes.

The benefits of technology is desired by people and thats what matters here.

> or very few and only for highly talented people

How many people and jobs are we talking about, if these are the jobs expected to support the vast majority of the populace? And on a related note, why would these people not feel resentful that (by necessity) a major chunk of their earnings is directed towards everyone else?

Assuming that humans will behave differently and be driven by different things than they have _for millenia_ is foolish, and why BI will never work.

Humans are part of a larger system, that system is evolution. For millions of years evolution have favored those who adapt to a new environment.

Thats the proper perspective to understand this discussion, not pointing back to a few thousand years of human civilization, unless of course you claim that humans is the last word in evolutionary process.

If you (like me) believe technology will take over most jobs then (U)BI is so far the best model we have as it will always make it worthwhile to work.

Absolutely, and this is also the problem with every* other basic income study that's been conducted over the past few decades.

If you promise basic income for only 5 years, then I'm probably not going to quit my job and become an artist because I can't be unemployed for 5 years and expect to waltz back into a job. If you promise basic income "forever", then I'm far more likely to retire at 30 and plan to never work again.

* I believe this is the case, correct me if there are any I missed

This is why Patreon still makes a lot more sense for artists.

Or you've got five years to work a reduced schedule and see if you can "make it" as an artist.

Seems great, as opposed to just trying to make it while working full time.

Would you not work? Basic income is nearly not enough to access luxuries. Sure you should be able to live off it, but I think most people would likely want more, the difference from forced equality being that you can still work and keep that as luxury money.

> I think most people would likely want more

Would they, though? That's the key question that I believe this study (and others like it) fail to address. Depending on the basic income amount, I believe it would be possible to live a fulfilling (if somewhat minimalist) life without needing to supplement that income.

I would want more. Currently I don't really care what I buy at supermarkets, I can go on 2 week holidays and potentially buy gadgets I like. However I can't really afford a car or buy a home or fancy synthesizers.

With BI I could spend more, but I would still keep on working towards a relaxing financial freedom where money is not a problem at all.

Besides a few monks, everyone I've met that makes under $20k/yr wants more. I've never seen a real area where people are comfortable until the $40k/yr mark. Yeah, I know there are exceptions (there's always outliers in data, but you can still find means and trends). So I am confident you wouldn't see a significant difference in number of workers unless you brought that UBI level up by several times the proposed $1k/mo.

I never understood that point. Almost everyone I know works fulltime although they could live a "fulfilling (if somewhat minimalist) life" on maybe 15h/week of work. If minimizing work would be a goal, most people would be able to do it right now.

Yes, this requires employer flexibility and the move from 40h->15h per week grants much less freedom than stopping work entirely but masses of people suddenly being content with a minimum amount of money does not sound convincing to me at all.

Haven't most studies around UBI shown that the only people that usually don't work when given a UBI are students and mothers (so they can focus on school and their children, respectively)?

Living off the basics is pretty dull. Most people who live ascetic lifestyles by choice usually come from a position of relative wealth and choose it more as an aesthetic or affectation than anything.

I think there are plenty of people who would be happy having a minimalist life, and there are those who would choose to see the world. And I believe that there are those who are drawn to doing things; working on stuff that they're interested in. And there are those who do want more stuff, and so will work.

All in all, I think there are enough people that things would be fine.

I agree. I think a lot would move to affordable places where that guaranteed income goes a lot further. If that's true then we aren't going to be as competitive on a global scale. Maybe that's not a big deal, maybe it's a huge deal; I don't know.

Anecdotally my friend is part Native-American and gets 4k/mo from the tribe's casino money and they're bumping it up more soon. She's chosen to be a stay at home mom.

The question really isn't whether someone person on Hacker News would want to work.

A better question would be, "how many would report their work out of an entire country was offered a basic income?" There are already data points for comparison, when that question is asked.

Most people on Hacker News are really not any different from anyone else in their country - they're just in a different line of work. The idea that you're a better/more moral person if you get paid more is a fallacy.

An interesting question is "can we reasonably automate things that people currently get paid less for than a basic income would be, or will we have to pay them more, and if we have to pay them more, what will be the economic effect of that?"

It may also work by making basic income really basic, so there’s an incentive to still go out there and specialize.

>>Most people on Hacker News are really not any different from anyone else in their country - they're just in a different line of work. The idea that you're a better/more moral person if you get paid more is a fallacy.

People on HN are significantly different and not even close to a representative sample. No one at any point is saying that HN readers are better or more moral, but there are huge, huge differences in technical skill, intelligence, knowledge, college attendance rates, social skills, empathy, and so forth compared to an average sampling of the population of the United States. I'll leave it up to everyone to decide which direction the arrow points in the above fields.

"The idea that you're a better/more moral person if you get paid more is a fallacy."

You are making arguments against things I never wrote, which is a strawman fallacy.

This is the problem with a lot of economic reasoning. The 'rational actor' construct works in toy models, but is much less useful in reality.

I took a couple years off a long time ago. I didn't stop working on stuff. Really, if you pay me, all that means is that I work on what you want me to work on, and maybe show up at particular times. It doesn't motivate me to work, it just motivates me to change topics.

I absolutely know people who would never work again. I know other people like me, who do it because they enjoy it. And details matter a lot, and tend to be ignored[1] by simplistic first-principle reasoning.

A big part of this is the ratio of those, and how quickly the number of jobs drop. I would fully expect this sort of thing to need tuning as it goes - I personally see the biggest change being a sudden explosion of people with lots of free time. Just as a tiny example, what does this do to the video game market? What about dry cleaners when fewer people wear business-drag?

Anyone who makes confident predictions based on econ101-style reasoning is simply dressing their politics up in an argument from authority.

[1] What does assortive mating look like under such a scheme - how much status will holding a job gain? Is the income set at an "uncomfortable" level, how will that change over time, what sort of barriers (class, academic, opportunities, etc.) will grow up around it? Are there any incentives to do something useful, even if it isn't what we think of as a 'job'?

Details really matter.

Seems like the most obvious conclusion is that labor for crappy jobs will become a lot more expensive. Basically any sector that relies upon cheaper labor, or is highly undesirable (think working on pipelines, coal mines, agriculture, sanitation, even low level medical care). And if it isn't based on wealth and only income, I can see a lot of professionals dropping out too once they've become comfortable.

I think you overestimate how much the average person prepares for the future. Look at the number of people who have emergency funds. 62% of Americans have <$1k and ~20% have no savings [1]. That number is too high to be explained away by necessary expenses. It is clear that people are just bad at saving. We can even look at the old game of "I'll give you a dollar today or five at the end of the week." Most people take the dollar today.

So with this time frame I believe initial ideas of "I'm going to put this to savings" will quickly disappear. Five years is a pretty long time, especially when considering at how bad humans are at preparing for the future.

What I think will be interesting is to see the different spending trends over time. I would imagine the first and last years are different than the middle three. But that's just a guess.

[1]

That's still not the same thing. Failing to save is partially because people think jobs are stable. That's unrelated to knowing you will need to get a job in 5 years after your extended basic income vacation.

Saving $1k has nothing to do with your job being stable or not. That's a safety net for life. It is the basic emergency fund. Cars break down, people get sick, life happens. So to extend your premise, "Failing to save is partially because people think expenses are stable." Which is clearly poor planning. We know humans are bad about estimating risk. I'm not sure why this is such a controversial idea.

What I'm saying is that if even those above the 50% income level are bad about saving a basic emergency fund, I don't expect those receiving this kind of grant to be any better at preparing emergencies. I do think they will be able to handle them better, but I do not expect them to plan better.

The 60 percentile income is < $46k. That people have little emergency funds on incomes less than this is largely explained away by necessary expenses. 20% have no savings -- the 20 percentile income is $17k. Show me a net savings budget on $17k.

The median income is $57k/yr [1]. Or we can go to the second chart and get the following: 11.2% make under $15k. 20.8% make under $25k. 30.2% < 35k, 43.1% under 50k, 60.1% under 75k.

The point isn't that the lower can't save, it is that people above the median income still don't save. These people should be able to save, but don't.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2017/demo/income-poverty/...

Since they have a control group, they can at least learn how people's behavior changes when they get free money for 5 years. 5 years is enough for going back to school, getting retrained, moving to a new location for better work prospects, etc.

They can't claim to know how people will behave if it is a lifetime, but evaluating some change is better than evaluating none.

Idea: what if they could hide from the recipients how long the program will take, while guaranteeing they'll get two years advance warning? Then for the first three years we might get something more representative of behavior on indefinite BI.

I do realize that by this point this would be hard to hide.

Also, leaks would eventually happen. Someone always knows someone who knows...

Most critically, UBI is a two-step system:

- A small amount of free money for everyone

- Rollback the state, welfare programs, etc. to balance out step 1

It's not realistic to reason about the effectiveness of the UBI proposal without considering the effects of the second step.

Can't we just have lotteries that have lifelong basic income as prices? It would mean free research data.

We can and we do, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/us/florida-teen-wins-top-p... (following those outcomes would be great research indeed)

That would be true of a real BI as well, as you dont know if the government will cut it on the next election!

"I have structured my life not to depend on roads, because you never know if the next government will stop maintaining them."

When there's a cultural shift to a UBI, that's not going to vanish overnight just because of an election cycle.

You sir, need to spend 2 years in Argentina to truly understand how the road example is absolutely applicable.

Its true that its easier to add than to remove. One solution to that would be to tie adding it to removing something else.

being time limited it gives you an actual hard value, so it becomes negotiable. I wonder if anyone will instead just use that to negotiate some credit at a favorable rate (say, 50k for those 60k) and actually start something greater than the expected subsistence.

Generally speaking, this would probably be the most efficient use of UBI: you trade it all away as soon as you exit college and invest it in something. I can see whole branches of financial and life insurance services growing out of this market.

I'm not sure if I or the people here are representative of the people the proposal targets, but if I had a guaranteed basic income for 5 years, I would attempt to start a startup full time.

> you need to guarantee them that stability forever

In that case, you're going to have to be content with a thought experiment, because there is no entity that can credibly make such a guarantee.

They'll have to train and prepare to enter the job market again? That's terrible!

If you’re attempting to study how a Basic Income would affect its recipients, then yes. It is terrible. It completely skews the behavior of the recipient in a way that a lifetime BI would not.

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