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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

The debate about basic income is based on the wrong premise in the sense that people evaluate it based on two different viewpoints of the world.

Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is based on the assumption there will be no jobs for most humans in the future.

What we have today is CBI or Conditional Basic Income which is conditional based on the assumption that you can motivate people to find jobs and that jobs will be available for most. If there are always going to be plenty of jobs then UBI makes no sense.

But if you believe that there be fewer and fewer jobs for humans, then UBI make a ton of sense.

I am of the latter belief.

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>> Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is based on the assumption there will be no jobs for most humans in the future.

That is not true. It could work very well in today's society. And UBI is not designed to have every other guy slacking around, you will still need incentives to work (i.e. paychecks).

Basic Income can, in theory, have wonderful effects without much changing the working world: Taking the pressure off people and a give them a hell lot of freedom and a stronger stance in negotiations.

No this is where I believe you and many others go wrong, especially, if you like me are a proponent.

It's an argument you can't win as there is no and will never be evidence that it could work. That's political territory IMO.

In my view, you will be much more likely to succeed that discussion if you manage to make it rational and about whether there will be jobs in the future than whether it's a better way to architect the current situation.

What about the other benefits of UBI, like increasing the bargaining power of labor?

Do you believe that basic income wouldn't be able to give workers a greater ability to say no to low-quality jobs and wages, forcing (1) automation or (2) an increase in both to attract workers?

UBI will always make it worthwhile to take a job because you wouldn't have to give any money back.

Financially, yes, economically, not necessarily. UBI greatly reduces the marginal value of the money you get from the job (since it's no longer the difference between paying for basic necessities or not), and since jobs have a cost, even if it's non-monetary, UBI may tip the balance against taking it.

Not sure what you mean.

If UBI is, let's say $40000 a year and you do various jobs that land you $10000 you now have $50000.

Why wouldn't I take that?

Because the jobs may suck, and while earning $10k is much better than $0, earning $50k is not that much better than $40k.

Which will be greatly countered by the fact that if you make $10K more than anyone else you are going to be one of the richest people you know. That $10K extra can buy you a lot of things.

Again, judging UBI based on how things look like today is exactly where the discussion goes wrong.

UBI makes sense if you accept the idea that there are almost no jobs left for humans.

It doesn't make sense in a world where there is plenty of jobs.

In other words, it's NOT a mechanism for getting people to work it's a way to ensure that all those people who have no work still have some way to buy things and keep some economy going.

Imho UBI could maybe even increase what little jobs will be left. People on UBI might only be willing to work part-time at reduced pay as the UBI makes up for the difference, employers would compensate by hiring two people for the same job and would generally have to be way more appealing to employes as the power-dynamic of that whole situation would be equalized.

The far bigger barrier are probably gonna be cultural notions anyway. Right now we are basically conditioned to constantly work, be looking for work or at least give the appearance of being "productive" in some way or another, it's a giant rat race that seems to be constantly accelerating.

Imagine a society where "working" more than 3-5 hours per day would be frowned upon, an utterly absurd idea to us, even tho it's realistically quite possible humans could live like that.

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