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> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity. I think the opposite will happen...

I would assume the burden of proof to be on you (and supporters of UBI) to prove that opposite will happen and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.

The burden of proof would be on me to prove that people will engage in transactions that will better their financial position? Strange. Seems like almost a given to me.

How many well-off people that have their basic necessities covered just slack off?

It's already extremely well established that people will work far beyond what they need to maintain basic necessities. There are all sorts of strong motivations for humans outside of basic survival. In addition if you look at groups with steady income streams and no perverse incentives (ex. retirees, trust funders) the vast majority remains productive in some capacity. If you are making the claim that UBI would so drastically change human behavior as to invalidate all this observed behavior than the burden of proof should be on you.

Burden of proof belongs to those who want to change the system. So if you want to convince fellow citizens to vote for UBI, you will have to convince them that people won't slack off once on UBI.

So again, can you please provide objective evidence for your assertions? Eg. "vast majority remains productive in some capacity." - I have no idea whether its true or not. Why should I trust you when you haven't provided any data to support that claim?

> Burden of proof belongs to those who want to change the system.

This is only true if the existing system does not keep on worsening. As the technology progresses human working hours has become more and more. How is this even fair when the whole point of technology is to make human life easier. So the Burden is on the people who want the current system not to change.

"Burden of proof belongs to those who want to change the system. "

What if it is impossible to bring the proof before the change has been tried? There is essentially no test scenario which can replicate, accurately simulate and predict the behaviour of people when millions of them suddenly receive a UBI.

At least if one agrees with the claim I just made, then following your logic, the change could never happen, for the simple reason as advanced proof of the effects is impossible to provide. So you would simply never find out if the proposed system would be better or worse than the current one.

Having said that, I do think the article makes a point worth considering.

> At least if one agrees with the claim I just made, then following your logic, the change could never happen...

... big changes could never happen... FTFY!

Which is what we are seeing: non-trivial health care changes happened in 2010 after 1965 (45 year gap), needed massive majorities in Congress and incurred huge political backlash. i.e. a smaller step was possible only after all the stars perfectly aligned.

I've always thought both will happen. Some number of people are going to be hurt by this (they'll stop being productive) while others will use UBI in a positive way and benefit from it. What's up in the air is which way it's going to lean, imo. There still ought to be something in place to try and minimize the downsides either way. Personally I'd be a fan of making a work or education requirement to receive all or part of the benefits, so you essentially can't just sit on your ass and collect the money just for breathing.

Baye's Theorem doesn't have a term for "burden of proof". If we want to claim that UBI will swing any way in particular, then we gotta pony up the evidence, regardless of the specifics.

Instead of volleying opinions back and forth, I think we would do better by discussing the ins and outs of current problems to which UBI is a single proposed possible solution.

> I would assume the burden of proof to be on you (and supporters of UBI) to prove that opposite will happen and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.

Most people who have the opportunity now don't slack off once their basic needs are covered, though the marginal effort needed to go beyond that is greater than it would be with a UBI. It is UBI opponents who are positing something contrary to all human experience in arguing that people in general would stop seeking improvement in material condition if the marginal cost of that beyond basic survival were reduced by UBI, so I think the burden is on them to, at a minimum, a rationale for believing that to be the case.

Though dealing with concerns like this (which, rational or not, are clearly significant) is among the many reasons why I think a gradual phase-in of universal income, gradually phasing out means-tested safety net programs, is better than trying a radical transition.

> and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.

Well to some level we can handle that right. If taxis are driving themselves, and other jobs get replaced by tech havent we liberated these folks?

If people want to work to feel useful great, but the point of technological advancement is that not everyone will have to.

I agree with your opinions on the current state of the Welfare system, and agree we need something better.

However I do think their is a non-trivial risk that a Basic Income depending on how it is implemented can result in a sever limiting or loss of liberty. We have already seen that with the welfare system today, and in other segments of the legal system where basic human rights are under continual assault to the point that most people do not even recognize properly the level of oppression that exisits in the world as it is today. They have assimilated the general rules and laws into their lives to the point they no longer "miss" the freedom they lost, or the freedom was lost so long ago no one alive even remembers a time where the law or regulation was not in place. The most common manifestation of these can be found in things like Airport Security, Drug Raids, Police Checkpoints, and about 1000 other things I can list.

If landlords know exactly how much a large subset of their renters make, that is how much they will charge. Examples of this in action is looking at rent in military areas and rises in BAH. They follow almost exactly, with rent being in response to BAH change.

Any form of UBI will just be used as a wealth transfer to landlords that rent.

"The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity."

Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.

Such as?

Did you know that if you make too much income you will lose your welfare? You can lose disability just for holding onto $2000 for someone. There are a lot of ways to lose welfare, and a lot of disincentives to get off of it. Being on welfare also gives you a large amount of disincentives towards finding a job.

Or that if you don't have any paid work you still might not get welfare?

Edit: added "still"

Thats a new one for me. I know you have to prove you're constantly looking for work to continue getting unemployment. I didn't know that some welfare requires having a job. Do you have more information about that?

I wasn't sufficiently clear. In the UK, many people don't get any benefit, even though they're out of work (or working for free), because they're unfamiliar with the rules, which are based on the fiction that paid work is easy to find.

Some welfare (aka workfare) does indeed require the unemployed person taking a full-time job, for which they are paid their jobseeker's allowance and no more, and if they refuse they get nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom

Would you give up your job to just subsist on Basic Income? I thought not. So why do you assume that huge numbers of other people would?

Would I, no but in my experiance I have a much greater work ethic than the average person, and I have a job that I love doing something that I also enjoy as a hobby.

I am not working in a menial job I hate or at a company that treats me like a human drone.

Further is not really about giving up your job, basic income is for people that will simply be phased out of the employment system due to automation, and other factors that simply will make them unemployable. They have no skills, not education, and often times will be unable to trained to do other more high skilled jobs

It is a complete fallacy that everyone can simply be retrained as a computer programmer when all the Driving Jobs, Fast Food Jobs, and Retail jobs are replaced by Robots

Then your experience is limited. There are people with skills and a good education who can't find work, because employers don't want them. Some of them are computer programmers.

The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits -- not to leave a small elite in work while the rest are reduced to idleness.

>>>Then your experience is limited. There are people with skills and a good education who can't find work, because employers don't want them. Some of them are computer programmers.

I am aware, my comment on retraining is that most times when I am involved in a conversation about Job Displacement enviably people respond by claiming everyone can just be retrained as a programmer.

As a programmer and sysadmin myself I am fully aware of the current state of the Job market for IT workers both on the operations side and the development side. I also know right now if a programmer can not find work it is often because they are unwilling to relocate to a market where the jobs are, and I am not just talking Silicon Valley which IMO is about the worst place to look for a job as a Dev right now.

>>>The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits

The purpose of Basic Income is to provide people a basic income to cover the necessities of life including Food, Shelter, etc. Allowing them freedom to persue other economic opportunities that will provide them with a higher standard of living,and to take some economic risk including possible starting small business or working for higher risk employers with out having to worry about their rent or if they will eat that day.

"I am not working in a menial job I hate or at a company that treats me like a human drone."

Maybe a future where nobody has to do those things isn't a bad goal. We don't have ten year olds breaking coal in the mines any more, nor do we have a peasant/slave class whose masters can beat them with impunity.

"It is a complete fallacy that everyone can simply be retrained as a computer programmer when all the Driving Jobs, Fast Food Jobs, and Retail jobs are replaced by Robots"

Yes. So what do you propose we do about those people?

I support either some kind of Basic Income, or Negative Income tax.

I think that is what we "do about those people"

I completely agree it will be a good day where you do not have people burning out their bodies in 40 years from working on the factory line then having to work another 25 years in pain because they can not afford to retire due to the low pay...

The problem is, today we just simply tell these people "get a job you loser" and assume anyone that can find said job is simply too lazy to work

With no basic income, and very limited welfare we have a massive problem today, that will grow exponentially in the coming decades unless we do something like Basic Income

> So why do you assume that huge numbers of other people would?

Because it's already happening

Most people don't have the skills to get a better job neither they have the will

Look at the numbers of hartz IV in Germany

The choice is a basic income or a shitty job with no basic income

And they are almost forcing people to work in what they call "mini jobs" to lower the number of unoccupied people, but it's not really working

If they could all have a basic income, regardless of working or not, they would not work, but have more children and more income for the family

Women prefer men who do something with their lives.

They still prefer men that can hunt and chop logs

But you can't if you have to go to work in the city

I think people are misinterpreting my comment. By 'doing something with their lives', I didn't mean working at a job. I meant something other than what it is often predicted that people will do on UBI, sitting around and watching TV.

In general, women already prefer even amateur musicians, athletes, etc. over couch potatoes.

I wonder this too...having grown up in a rural area I can easily envision UBI creating a near permanent class of people who live off it alone. Why bother to go to college or a trade school if you can hang with your friends spending your days in recreation at 18?

I use to be a proponent of UBI, but now I genuinely fear what it would do to society at large.

The problem is that opportunities for the type of people who would make that choice are largely disappearing anyway. So it's not UBI vs. trade school and a job. It's UBI vs. a massive underclass of angry, desperate unemployed people.

Because living a basic existence isn't very attractive to the vast majority of people. Spending your days in recreation isn't very fun when you don't have a lot of money to spend.

How arrogant. There are 2 points:

1. If people can get a lot of money just by working hard, why don't they already have a lot of money, but rely on the UBI?

2. For people that's really poor and can only live on UBI, well, more money is never a bad thing, but they can live without the money. That's what they had been doing all this time after all.

Great questions poorly framed.

1) Because, right now, there is a huge market distortion that is difficult to see because we've been living with it since we've invented agriculture and specialization -- people must earn money to live. This is a market singularity with a rapid drop off. If you need water within the next hour or you will die, you will pay anything to get it from whomever has it. If you will be homeless in three weeks unless you come up with rent it loses a bit of urgency but you might find yourself selling your time for less than it is worth under conditions that aren't so existentially dire. If that horizon is pushed out to three months then it might be remote enough that it only occurs to you every once in a while how important it is to keep a steady income.

Those that are continually on the brink of disaster constantly have to worry about a very short time horizon until their existence, or, at the very least, living without pain, is threatened. It is like a weight on the other side of the scale for them. And worse, the people and entities negotiating on that side of the scale know it. So, they offer just enough to keep them alive and struggling. It is not in their best interest to offer more. So these people on the brink remain on the brink, selling what little they have (time , usually) for less than it would be worth without that distorting weight on the other side of the scale.

This is very difficult for people who have not been in that situation or who have not been in that situation or who have outside support structures to keep them from that state to understand. If they don't think about the full context of the decision and the invisible but very real cost of the alternative to a negotiated agreement then it is very easy to think that everyone is making the same choices with the same freedoms. Most need to work to eat, after all, right? But they discount the time horizon, the urgency, and the expectations of future income that they might enjoy compared to someone else.

2: Anyone can live without money much money as long as basic needs are met. Some might enjoy their free time so much that no matter how much they can make if they give some up they would refuse. But, for the reason of the distortion I described above, a huge swath of the poor and working poor aren't being offered enough to get ahead, just enough to keep afloat. So now the choice is 'work your ass off and barely stay afloat or have lots of free time and barely stay afloat'. I know which I'd choose.

The thing about rural living is that it doesn't take a lot of money to lead a satisfying life - at least while you're young. I had a blast hunting, fishing, hiking, playing disc golf and other activities that required very little money.

I knew that it couldn't last forever, that I needed an education / skill and a career. UBI changes that and IMO, incentivizes failure to launch.

Ultimately, I think UBI is both a launchpad for high performers and a cage for those not so talented. I think our focus should be on building employment opportunities for everyone, instead of giving up prematurely and creating such a bright lined class system.

I don't think we should be creating menial jobs just to take up people's time because we think they are untalented.

If people want to live on the bare minimum and hunt and fish with the rest of their time, more power to them. They value their time doing those activities more than the money they can trade for it. But when they get tired of it or want something more they'll have the freedom to pull themselves out. There might be a bright line, but it will be easy for anyone that wants to step over whenever they feel like it.

> Because living a basic existence isn't very attractive to the vast majority of people

The vast majority of people are already living a fulfilling basic existence

It's the minority of people from big cities and great ambitions that maybe would not like it

This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.

If you're going to make that argument you have to correct for the fact that many welfare state programs implicitly encourage people to slack off. If you're 'caught' going to school or taking courses, working part time or trying start your own business you can, in many cases, end up kicked off of welfare. Earning an extra dollar while on UBI will leave you with an extra dollar to spend. Earning an extra dollar while on welfare can in many cases leave you a lot worse off.

Also many welfare programs require you to jump through regular bureaucratic hoops that will eat up a lot of your time and energy. We don't really know what will happen if we remove those restrictions.

This counter point really didn't address the article; that we risk creating tyrannies when we use the government to support everyone. That is so much money and power it will corrupt any person or organization who wields it.

For example, it's a 'universal' income right? Do people still get it when they're in prison for rape/murder? How about in jail for a few weeks on shoplifting? What if a citizen is living in another country? What if they're here illegally? Do you get one for each kid the moment they're born? What if the kid is born in the US and parents are illegal immigrants? And just how much UBI should everyone get? Your answers to these questions will not agree with your neighbor's answers.

A UBI would become more corrupt than anything else we've seen because there will be even more power in it. The power hungry will seek it and corrupt it because we will never agree on who has a right to that giant pile of money.

We already use the government to support everyone to some degree. The government already wields enormous power.

In what ways would UBI be different?

Wait. Isn't the point that we're trying to gather empirical data on what happens. Without this data "strong belief" one way or another seems a bit irresponsible to me.

Sure. Call it a hypothesis. But many people are trying to shut down the experiments before they happen.

Completely agree. Basic Income would not only be tremendously stimulative and probably lead to more growth and demand for labor, it would also give many the flexibility to avoid traps of poverty and engage with the economy in a more sustainable and ultimately productive way.

I have not spent much time studying basic income, but I'm sure the topic of inflation must be addressed. What's the current thinking on basic income having an effect on inflation?

Nobody addresses the topic of inflation because it is not real. It's just some FUD somebody though about and survives due to disinformation.

Government deficits¹ generate inflation, what is a completely orthogonal concept to UBI.

1 - Among a few other factors, but the deficits are the one relevant here.

> Nobody addresses the topic of inflation because it is not real. It's just some FUD somebody though about and survives due to disinformation.

I agree that inflation is a synthetic construct and doesn't necessarily need to exist. However, it persists because regardless of what name we assign the effect, it is a truism that market forces are never in perfect equillibrium so we'll always have some degree of inflation or deflation. Inflation is not an instantaneous metric, instead relying on prior and publically available CPI data (1) via the Bureau of Labor Stats site.

In general, as wages increase, the increase in buying power drives demand, driving increased product prices (2). Price increases are difficult to reverse. So, the OC is correct to question the impacts of UBI on inflation. I think it will increase inflation at inception, but the impact would probably quickly wane as UBI becomes standard (Caveat: I am strong against UBI for other reasons, I'm just making a point about inflation here)

Needless to say, plenty of discussion on this specific topic is found (3) by performing a search of the world wide web (www).

1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/headline-inflation.asp

2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

3. http://basicincome.org/news/2016/11/will-basic-income-cause-...

> I have not spent much time studying basic income, but I'm sure the topic of inflation must be addressed. What's the current thinking on basic income having an effect on inflation?

Basic income will certainly (in its initial implementation and with any increases) have some effect on price levels of goods, increasing the prices of goods demanded more by net beneficiaries and reducing those demanded disproportionately by those who are net payers in whatever the funding mechanism is.

But those should be such that the net beneficiaries still have increased buying power and the net payers have decreased buying power.

> UBI isn't meant to be a full replacement for an individual's economic activity.

Indeed not.

> It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities.

Honestly, I think this is one of the fundamental mistakes UBI proponents make: proposing the idea that there is some particular level that UBI should reach.

UBI is much more coherent of an idea if the "basic" is recast as representing simply a baseline, rather than targeting basic necessities, which are, critically, not a fixed target anyhow, but a moving baseline determined by social expectations, which UBI itself will affect.

> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.

Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons. Mostly, ignores a lot of basic observations of human behavior and the difference between UBI and the systems it displaces:

(1) People strive for more material wealth, so long as that provides perceived marginal utility (there's some evidence that beyond certain very high incomes -- IIRC, studies ~10-20 years ago had this in the neigborhood of $200K/yr in then-current dollars in the US -- but even so people strive for more when they have that much because of perceived utility.)

(2) People's expectations and self-perceived "basic needs" are strongly influenced by comparison to others visible in their society, not merely absolute conditions; UBI improves the absolute condition of those without capital or labor income, but it doesn't remove the incentive to strive for more (in fact, compared to a system with a means-tested safety net, it increases it.)

(3) Capital income is still a thing with UBI: this is perhaps them most significant oversight in UBI criticism. Its true that UBI is often posed as a protection against a world in which an ever increasing share of the population is unable to find work with significant value, reducing (at least, in a relative sense) the income of workers, it is not intended for a situation where there is no opportunity to strive for more. Between UBI and what people can make from work, there are opportunities to acquire capital, which is the route to development which remains open even if labor opportunities become scarce.

(4) But labor opportunities won't disappear in the near term, though many may pay less per hour (especially at the entry level.) But UBI makes lower-pay labor both viable (by providing support which isn't removed with additional labor income) and legal (as it is usually posed as replacing minimum wage -- I personally prefer a phase-out where minimum wage is reduced as UBI ramps up), which increases rather than decreasing work opportunities.

> We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution.

Well, UBI won't drive that, at any rate, and largely opposes it. There's a very good argument that the first part is largely true, and you could argue that the one thing that's been happening in recent years is the fine tuning of just how little is necessary to hit just the point where the second half is true, too.

> I think the opposite will happen

Looking at what's already happened, one can only say it's the most probable outcome.

Look at what happened in USSR.

Or what happens right now in Switzerland where pay checks are so high that almost nobody works at 100%, they all have some kind part time job.

Any other assumption is, well, an assumption, and a risky one.

The USSR tried basic income? News to me.

Doesn't Switzerland have high productivity and wealth? Does it matter that people are just working part time there or is that a Really Good Thing (do we all need to be working 40+ hours?)

> The USSR tried basic income? News to me.

They had a system where every citizen had an income, no matter what

The difference is that you could not make more than that

> Doesn't Switzerland have high productivity and wealth?

No, Switzerland salaries have been rising a lot in the past 20 years, but labour productivity has been slowly but steadily going down.

Most of the salaries are high compared to siblings western countries (for example Italy, where I come from) but they are just enough to live in Switzerland.

So the answer is no: not everybody needs to work 40 hours a week, they just need to work enough to gain a basic income that's enough to have a decent life.

In Zurich a 40 sm (430 square foot) costs between 1.600 and 2.300 euros/month.

In Italy that's a very good salary. And you can rent a house of more than 100 sm (1,000 sf) in the centre of a big city like Rome or Milan.

Switzerland recently rejected the idea of an UBI set at 2,500 Swiss francs/month =~ 2.100 euros, in Italy for many families that's around 2 salaries.

Imagine being Swiss, having more than 2 thousand euros of UBI from your country and living in Italy. A family of 2 could afford a villa in Como lake, next to George Clooney have his.

The same can be said for someone receiving an UBI in Bay Area and Missisipi.

Making it work is already very hard, making it right is next to impossible.

>The difference is that you could not make more than that

Pretty big difference. A core difference, as a matter of fact.

Switzerland has the 9th highest GDP per capita (higher than the US) in the world. They rank 4th in a tight bunch at the top of the world happiness index. It seems that UBI hasn't collapsed their country or turned it into a dystopian tyranny.

> Pretty big difference. A core difference, as a matter of fact

Not as much as you think

USSR collapsed under war debts and lack of freedom, not because people wanted more money

And the first notable consequence were people dying for home made vodka: they couldn't afford to buy vodka in the stores and poisoned themselves

> It seems that UBI

They rejected it!

That's why it did no harm

> Switzerland has the 9th highest GDP per capita

It matters only if you, as I said, live outside Switzerland

It's the 9th highest GDP per capita, but it probably ranks higher for living cost

If you live there, as I did, I can assure you that for your basic needs 30,000 Swiss francs (around 31,000 USD) are barely enough to survive

40 minutes away there's Italy, Milan, where 30,000 euros/year is more than enough to have a decent life

Don't you think this would put some pressure on Swiss borders?

It's what happened when Schengen allowed people to go to Berlin and live on allowance

UBI is a delicate matter, it make citizen dependent on the state providing, without giving bak

Now we in Europe have a pretty decent public health care, superior to the US one, and a pretty decent state welfare

It's based on the fact that everybody is contributing (well, if we don't count tax evasion, but that's a different matter) in proportion to their personal income

if a small part of the population is gonna live on UBI (say 15%) and nothing else, it's gonna put even more pressure on taxation of the productive segment of the population, which is already heavily taxed (in Italy on average is 47%, in Denmark it can reach a wobbling 60%)

It would destroy welfare as we know it

I'm not against, but I don't share the enthusiasm

I would be very careful