To me is seems like an attempt to retain the current power structures and the current status of the contemporary elite, by trying to retain an outdated economic system past the point when the vast majority of people will end up completely cut of from it.
That said, I think a UBI-like scheme will have HUGE unintended consequences in the dating/marriage market. Many/all potential partners/mates will no longer have an 'easy' way to signal their potential marriage value outside of physical fitness and proven virility/fertility. For a lot of the population you'll have taken away a key factor in assessing potential marriage value. I think that'll tend towards polygamy/andry in a few decades' time.
We all exist in that landscape, so we all need to have the discipline not to be sensationalist when commenting about it on HN, or we won't have much of an HN left to comment on. Could you please help us with that? The spirit of the site is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
The USA is different to most countries in that it has almost all the world's biggest companies. The number one way to maximise US tax revenues is to reduce the incentives to offshore cash, and even a small change in the monetary strategy could have huge results.
Contrast that with Iceland (~330K people) and their best way to maximise tax revenue is to sell their cheap geothermal power to aluminium smelters and have them pay virtually no company taxes, as taxing the wage earners the smelters generate is their best bet.
Pragmatism is often extremely ugly.
These guys obviously weren't the 0.1%, but people do try to study these things.
Finally, I realize that this doesnt have to come from the state. Foundations and other aspects of the private sector are capable of doing this on a larger scale than we realize
Exactly. And more specifically, if Silicon Valley were to identify this as a problem to solve with its brains, money, and technology, then the problem might be solved much sooner, more easily, and more efficiently as compared to waiting for a politically correct solution from a government.
One experiment for basic income that has not been tried: create a new cryptocurrency that makes UBI distributions to all wallets. The question created by such a cryptocurrency is whether the issues created by making such distributions (such as preventing people from making an infinite number of wallets) have practical technological solutions.
If there are technological solutions to the problems inherent in a UBI cryptocurrency, then the idea should be implementable by either a cryptocurrency or a government (if a government ever got around to it). Furthermore, if there are not solutions to the problems inherent in a UBI cryptocurrency, then that could help convince UBI supporters that 1) UBI might not be a good solution and 2) a solution other than UBI needs be identified.
[2] https://www.mannabase.com/
[3] https://medium.com/@fcecin/the-basic-whitepaper-7e789f16abe
[4] http://www.greshm.org/files/greshm.pdf
[5] https://ourbasicincome.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/circles-univ...
This is less “solving a problem” than it is an experiment at this time, of course.
I am skeptical that UBI will work because paying people for nothing seems like it may be counterproductive by creating rampant inflation or by acting as a disincentive for most.
The rampant inflation argument, which most economists would use to argue against UBI, is interesting because most countries seem to be suffering from deflation. If deflation is a problem, then inflation created by UBI could be beneficial to an economy. But getting a government to start up a new UBI program to combat deflation does not seem like an efficient path for creating a solution because governments are slow, rarely do things correctly, and magnify their mistakes by taking years to correct initial imperfections.
Rather, focusing the brains, money, and technology of Silicon Valley on proving the idea with a cryptocurrency based UBI seems like a much more efficient approach to either 1) create a solution (the preferred option) or 2) settle the debate so that we can move on.
Because I believe this, I support much higher deficits, and thus am a hybrid Republican/Democrat: I want low taxes, and high government spending. However, aside from infrastructure, I'd want the government spending to be a bottom up type of spending like UBI, because it would give people seed money to start businesses, and more money to spend at other's businesses.