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Comment by brookside | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently on an Amtrak train between Philadelphia and NYC.

Especially in leafless winter, the sheer uglyness of this swath of in-disrepair America is almost shocking.

Abandoned factories and houses. Lifeless downtowns. Trash along the tracks. Non-sweet graffiti.

Paying people to do nothing when there is so much to be done seems crazy to me. It's not like we have figured out how to solve these problems with AI or robots yet.

I could listen to an argument for paying people to participate in FDR-style public works programs. Building a bicycle lane network. Planting flowerbeds. Demolition and recycling and then re-urbanization or re-forestation of those crumbling factory grounds. And so many more things that would make this a better place to exist.

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If you want to point to the single concept that has to be re-examined to understand basic income it is this one:

   "Paying people to do **nothing** when there 
    is **so much** to be done seems crazy to me."

It speaks to the foundation question of value for capital that is pounded into our heads (in the US at least) from birth that if you want to make it you need to get a job that pays well. And it forces us to ask the very important questions and re-examine some of our assumptions.

Some of the things I have thought about when considering BI have been, is it really "nothing" we are paying for? Lets say you're living in a neighborhood without any jobs available, and without jobs and property taxes your educational infrastructure is lacking, and without a job in the first place your mobility is lacking. However you do find employment in selling illegal drugs, the market is wide spread, the risk is low for the street level dealers. Now into that market your provide a basic income for the youth who can now pursue their interests without participating in some form of underground economy. Can you see paying people to not participate in that economy?

When I think about BI I have come to think about removing worry rather than paying for 'nothing'. IF you look at income disparity versus economic efficiency, economies grow when there is incentive to get ahead but they begin to contract once that disparity exceeds a threshold. If the bottom of the economy is worried about where they are going to sleep and eat tonight, they aren't very efficient or contributory to the overall GDP, if the top end of the economy is keeping all of its wealth bottled up in trading games with other top end users, it isn't contributing to the overall GDP either.

If you force disparity to zero, you essentially get communism, if you leave disparity unconstrained forever you appear to get monarchistic type trapped wealth. If you change the rules of the game so that people can be wealthy or not, but the total difference between maximum wealth and minimum wealth is constrained to 2 orders of magnitude rather than 4. Perhaps you get a better system overall.

Money represents value created. If you simply hand out money, say in the form of BI, without it being in exchange for value created, you are simply deflating the value of money. This will cause inflation. And you'll end up back where yo started - the recipients of BI have more money but its buying power has been reduced, canceling each other out.

I'm with the parent comment. There is so much work to be done in this world - we should first try to tackle those before taking the BI shortcut.

I find this argument unconvincing not just because the evidence doesn't support it (and it doesn't), but because this claim is the same one made whenever anyone proposes anything to put more money in the hands of the poors.

Every time, it's the exact same argument, "if you give the poors more, everything will cost more, and they'll be right back where they started." And, well, we didn't always look like this. Obviously it's possible for there to be a different equilibrium in society, one with less disparity. So something has changed.

Seems like there should be ways to change it back, even to the disparity we had (overall, I know life was horrible for PoC) in post-WWII America. That'd be a step up from this.

I see it a bit differently, instead of thinking of it as 'money representing value created' I think of it as 'money represents value received.' I realize the difference may seem like semantic hoops but to illustrate how I see it, consider this scenario.

A dozen people erect tents and lean-to shelters out of ad-hoc materials on a city street to stay out of the weather while they sleep. They use the gutter (or not) as an open air latrine. If a BI system is providing them with some money which they can apply toward a system of shelters or temporary living space, I "receive" an environment where I'm more productive because I'm not worrying about the people living on my doorstep. That is worth a lot to me, and I can unilaterally start giving money to anyone sleeps in front of my house so that they can get a room at a hotel or shelter bed but it doesn't change the systemic reasons that person is sleeping on the street. Now if I give them a BI stipend and combined with wages they get from working they can find a shelter, then not only are they better off but I am better off as well and the economy as a whole is more productive.

That is achieved by capturing some of the excess wealth being generated by the economy and directing it toward the quality of life improvement for everyone (the homeless are housed and I don't have to dodge their encampments on the street and city services are more able to cope with people living in expected places and provide garbage and sewage services.

Maybe the question is: who will employ the people in these areas where employment is low and the level of poverty is high? And what will those employers be doing that generates enough income to employ these people?

Your comment hints that the government (federal or state) will be the employer and the work will involve public works of some kind. So far, neither have been interested in actually doing these kinds of projects despite the need. Maintaining such project is also a concern: in an area where the income of the population is tied directly to public works projects, what happens when these projects come to an end and the population returns to unemployment?

The current regime explicitly excludes those who do not have income. Whenever we talk about helping people in poverty in the US, we inevitably circle back to tax breaks. If these people have little or no income to begin with, in what way will tax breaks help? If so many decisions are going to be made based on "the market deciding", how will they participate without enough income? If we look at broadband access in these areas, we'll see vendors complaining that there's no point in rolling out service if no one can afford it.

Basic income will allow these people to participate in the market and, hopefully, in their local economy. They will decided what projects deserve funding based on the way they spend their money.

Wouldn't the most logical thing be for people to reinvest their BI in the illegal drug trade? It's not like there isn't precedent for that kind of thing happening elsewhere:

"And some projects aimed at reducing poaching by alleviating poverty have backfired, said Duffy. For example, one program in Ghana was intended to decrease poaching by paying a premium on crops, on the theory that hunter-poachers would focus instead on farming. They did for a period, but then used the money they’d earned to buy more sophisticated weapons that they used to shoot more lucrative species [1]."

Beyond that, everyone seems to ignore the inflationary nature of BI. What will happen to the economy in real, not nominal, terms?

[1] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/22/zambia-poach...

Would that be bad? ChuckMcM was arguing that BI would allow someone to worry less about where they would sleep and when they would eat. That they use their money to get more money should be good. Your opposition seems to be based on implied immorality of drugs.

My opposition is to funding both the DEA et al. and the dealers.

100%.

It's possible that a basic income would help with the rest of these, by taking the edge off the (currently very high) opportunity cost of spending time on community improvement for working class Americans.

It would also move money back into these economies in a way that support some of the kinds of industrial district revitalization that you see in more urban areas nowadays.

All in all, the capitalist in me wants to say that you'll get better results if you just give people money and let them figure out how to dispose of it, rather than letting some government bureaucrat off in the state capital or wherever try to figure out how best to use the money. The latter option is worryingly similar to the root causes of the worst of the prosperity-destroying waste that went on in places like the Soviet Union. And I do think you'll see people (mostly) put the money they'd get from a basic income to good use. It's not like anyone enjoys living in a blighted town; it's just that they're living under economic conditions that leave them with little other choice, aside from maybe doing like I did and contributing to the blight by moving out of town.

You need more than BI and warm bodies to improve your crumbling city infrastructure. There's a whole lot of skillsets that go into infrastructure development, including some type of organizational structure.

There are.

It's very hard to acquire those skill sets if you need to choose between having enough money to pay the bills, and spending time and money on acquiring those skills. Or alternatively, it's a lot easier to attract people with those skills into your community if you have the money to pay them for their skills.

My point remains, I think you'd see people in blighted areas sink a lot more of their resources into community improvement if the opportunity cost of doing so weren't as cripplingly high as it is now.

Right, at the very least, it's hard to improve a community when most of that community's members are working 60+ hour weeks just to provide for basic necessities.

Most companies don't have incentives to care about the communities their employees are from, or the skills to help. It's not deemed productive or efficient in current corporate interests to use corporate wealth to ensure their employees have healthy home lives in healthy communities. (Shareholders, C-Suite, board members most companies certainly care enough about their home lives/communities right now, but outside of the investor class there's very little financial empathy and little incentive to have empathy because that stuff doesn't necessarily show up on a quarterly report.)

Frankly I guess we have a fundamental disagreement, IMO public works (which is what the original comment was talking about) are best conducted by the public sector, not by John down the street in his spare time. Now, I do agree John will probably make his neighborhood just a nicer place to be if he has time & discretionary income.

We already pay people to do nothing, in the form of dividends and capital gains. And we pay them a lot.

I'm a fan of UBI in that I believe we have the ability to provide everyone with the basic necessities of life, and providing it without demeaning means-testing and the attendant labelling and stigma seems the right way to do it.

But I'm not a fan of only giving money. That money ultimately comes from the corporate economy, which owes a large debt to the common purse. For example, we pedestal google, amazon, etc, but they wouldn't exist without the DARPA (government) funding which created the internet, and even more basic research before that, law and order to protect it, education to allow people to even read it, a road network to allow it to spread, I could go on. And then there are what should be commonly-owned monopolies like land, radio spectrum, etc, etc. So I think corporations, rather than just paying this "common debt" in taxes (which they don't appear too keen to do), should be part-owned collectively.

So, we should have some kind of Universal Basic Income, but it should come in the form of dividends derived from Universal Basic Ownership, eg a system something like all companies should be 30% owned by a Universal wellfare fund which everyone gets a share of.

I agree that we should stop paying people to do nothing: Right now that's the super-rich who might be getting another tax cut for Christmas.

We have so much idle capital that is currently only being used to take over the competition rather than for innovation and investment. Am I alone in seeing the general public and local communities have more of a stake in what infrastructure and things we need, and should be more economically involved?

  "Paying people to do nothing"

I think you have the wrong concept in your head. You've missed other portions of the larger economic system, by focusing on an individual atomic result as a platonic hypothesis of personal meaning. The presumed psychological effect, rather than broader the aggregate realities.

As easily as one might complain of rewarding mediocrity and paying into an unredeeming, bottomless void that bears no fruit, another might complain that a civilization founded on the threat of starvation and death by exposure isn't very civilized at all.

Take these two extremes on their own, and it's pretty easy to understand that a wide, ignored middle-ground exists, that rhetoric neglects. On one hand, a person is met by an offer to participate in society, in exchange for the obvious benefits society has to offer. On the other hand, stepping off the treadmill for too long risks permanent demotion, and a life sentence of perhaps animalistic subsistence, pan-handling, living off stolen cat food in a shanty town under a bridge, or worse, maybe suicide and unspoken realities in between.

I always though that as long as the US has a social program, it should be CC style (although there is also an argument for something like Teach for America, a 6'4 50 year old lumberjack might help prevent unruly classes), because (and here I cannot help but sound insanely old) making something gives you a certain amount of pride that helps you in many ways - you can be an ex drug addict who is trying to get permission to just see the kids just once a week, but you build that cabin, or cleaned that grassy knoll, or fixed that fence, or whatever.

Making something that objectively makes your country a better place, beyond just building a little cabin, might given you some sense of pride & stake/ownership in your country, as well.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "CC Style?" You make a lot of sense with this post. Even UBI will not replace the human drive or need to create or feel satisfaction, and people will pursue that in healthier ways in their Survival Mode is taken care of (imho).

Civilian conservation corps, the make work program of the depression.

That assumes that a basic income would only motivate people to do nothing, which seems more pessimistic than realistic.

I think it is more realistic.

Following that maybe-pessimistic-maybe-realistic vein a bit further, that might not be such a bad thing.

Crime is a huge problem in poor communities, dealing with it is hideously expensive to taxpayers, and one of the major motivators behind it is economic stress. Wouldn't it be sweet if people who are currently motivated to commit crimes were instead motivated to do nothing?

Crime is caused more by envy for what others have and a failure to understand the role of work in getting what you want.

Basic income will only FEED these two problems.

You might be surprised to learn how many people get into jobs like drug dealing because it's the career option in their community that pays better than minimum wage.

Crime also tends to correlate negatively with wealth redistribution, not positively. Correlation != causation, natch, but it's also the case that if your causative claim were true, then one would expect the correlation to be positive rather than negative.

I don't consider selling products to people to be a crime.

It's generally an entry level position in a company that operates in the "organized crime" market sector.

Only where it is illegal.

If victimless crimes like gambling, high interest lending, drug use and adult prostitution were all legal, there be less of a reason for organized crime to exist.

My feeling is that this sort of things should be regulated at a neighborhood level, so that it is possible to not have them in some neighborhoods where they are unpopular, while still being accessible in other not-too-distant areas where people do want them.

In any case, such trade is not a crime that would go away with basic income. People will have MORE to spend on vices, actually.

I think there are plenty of people on disability who also use opioids. That would be a lot harder without that money.

Doesn't it depend on the crime? Someone breaking in and stealing my television to sell for drug money isn't envious of my TV; he just needs to get high. Someone engaged in a hit-and-run isn't envious of my car, they just can't afford car insurance and know that if they stick around they're very likely going to lose their license, car, and the ability to get to work.

Sure, some crime is due to just people being too lazy to get a job, but it's not a universal cause.

Of course. But nobody is doing hit and runs so they can make a living.

They don't do the hit to make a living, but they might commit the run to continue doing so.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with making a living or basic income so I fail to see the point of discussing that particular crime.

When I said "Crime is caused more by envy", I was not making an absolute statement about all kinds of crime.

Money is useless without power. I think all this talk of BI in isolation hides the socio-political dimensions. The problems you describe are a result of market forces. The ability to do something about it is vested in a political system. Throwing money around won’t solve that.

I would argue that people without money lack power and are pretty much excluded from the political system. They often live in areas where the state level policies are making it difficult to vote (shorter voting hours, fewer polling places, more documentation requirements). Giving them income provides them the ability to become more involved.

Great point; a lot of the infrastructure we are so proud of on both sides of the aisle, was built back then. We generally agree we need to invest in infrastructure, too.

The thing is that this type of work will be gone in idk, 20-30 years?

So will most of the Baby Boomers. A 20 year economic plan that gets through a major demographic shift which then needs a new plan anyway sounds pretty good to me.

One way to look at it is that people wouldn't, in fact, be paid to do nothing. They would be paid for the valuable service they provide; using their knowledge and experience to select products and services.

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