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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Sam makes an interesting analogy with Y Combinator as providing a form of "basic income" to people trying to start startups. However, this analogy ignores a huge difference in the two cases: the people who are trying to start startups with Y Combinator's help are a highly self-selected group. Giving them "basic income" often turns out to be highly productive, yes. But that does not imply that giving basic income to everybody would turn out to be highly productive.

To be fair, he does describe what he's attempting as an "experiment" and acknowledges that it might not work out the way he thinks.

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"Sam makes an interesting analogy with Y Combinator as providing a form of "basic income" to people trying to start startups. "

These two things aren't even close to the same thing. If Y Combinator accepted every single applicant, than yes, it would be equivalent to UBI. They obviously do not.

> These two things aren't even close to the same thing.

Tell that to Sam, not me. He made the analogy.

I know, I was just agreeing with you.

Also when a startup burns out their runway it dies and investors probably won't fund the same idea twice.

What happens to the people who blow their UBI on drugs/gambling etc instead of healthcare and prosperity. Who will pay to re-fund them? (and fund them again?)

My guess is that it would be handled the same as senior citizens who gamble or drink. Next month another check arrives, same as usual.

But who worries about this, or would consider cutting social security due to drinking or gambling?

> who worries about this, or would consider cutting social security due to drinking or gambling?

We don't consider that because we maintain the polite assumption that people get paid from social security after they retire because they paid into it while they were working. There are plenty of cases where that's not true, but we allow ourselves to treat them as outliers, and assume that the money people get from social security is basically "their" money; the government just saved it for them.

UBI removes the option to think of things this way. I think a lot of UBI proponents have not fully considered the implications of that.

Part of the point of UBI is to confront this "if you don't work, you can't eat" attitude head-on, and change it to one where all citizens deserve a certain amount of money (however small, to start) just for being people who stay out of trouble.

It's an uphill battle to be sure.

> this "if you don't work, you can't eat" attitude

It's not an "attitude", it's a fact of life. In order for you to eat, a certain amount of work has to be done. Why should someone else do it if you're perfectly capable? We've already made it a lot easier for you by having a huge economy where you can do all sorts of things that can be traded for food, instead of having to grow all your own food yourself.

The attitude that really needs to be confronted is that the amount of work that needs to be done by some human in order for that human to eat is fixed. It isn't; technology can reduce it. (And in fact it already has, by quite a lot; that's why only about one in twenty people has to work at growing food today, compared with about 19 in 20 a couple of centuries ago.) But there are huge political barriers to technology reducing it further: governments meddle in all kinds of ways that artificially inflate the cost of getting enough food and other necessities. What we really need to do is stop doing that, so entrepreneurs like Sam Altman can use technology to make necessities so cheap that nobody will have to worry about UBI, because anyone who isn't actually disabled or otherwise incapable will be able to earn a living.

There's no "fact of life" here, it's just outdated ideology. If only one person in twenty is needed to grow food (in the US, presumably), that means we can easily feed everyone. But we can't find jobs for everyone. Automation will make it worse.

> If only one person in twenty is needed to grow food (in the US, presumably), that means we can easily feed everyone.

Who is this "we"? When I translate what you say into plain English, what I get is: One in twenty people will grow food and be forced to give it to everyone else, whether they want to or not. I agree that is an outdated ideology, yes. But the fact that food needs to be produced somehow is not.

> we can't find jobs for everyone

Again, who is "we"? Whose job is it to find jobs for everyone? Why is that necessary?

> Automation will make it worse

Automation can make things cheaper and cheaper; that's why it has continued to increase. That's making things better, not worse.

What makes things worse is pretending that products and services, whether produced by automation or any other means, will magically get distributed to where they are needed, or that "we" will magically decide correctly how that is to be done. That is indeed an outdated ideology, but unfortunately many people have not yet gotten the memo.

What will make things better is admitting that products and services have to be produced, and then traded for other products and services, in order for people to get the things they need. So the more efficient that process is, the less effort it will take for people to get the things they need, and therefore the easier it will be for them to do so.

The money flow for Social Security is taxes -> senior citizens -> Walmart (and other stores) -> suppliers. The money flow for basic income would be similar. How stuff gets produced isn't magic; it's much the same as today's economy.

If the paychecks stop coming and nothing replaces them, consumers stop buying and you get a recession or worse. The key is to keep the money flowing from companies to consumers in some other way. The clever bit with the "Great American Share" idea is that the money gets collected via dividends instead of taxes.

> The money flow for Social Security is taxes ->

No, the money flow for Social Security is payments that were previously made by the recipients. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. It's only because our government has raided the Social Security trust fund for decades that current payments have to be paid from tax revenues.

> How stuff gets produced isn't magic; it's much the same as today's economy.

You didn't include production anywhere in your money flow. Where does it come in?

UBI would be a monthly (or perhaps weekly) payment, not a one time lump sum.

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