Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia | Hacker News Reader

Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia

slatestarcodex.com

50 pointslainon23 comments

Good article. Money quote: "Basic income is unlimited runway. Entrepreneurs can feel free to try out crazy ideas without the constant pressure of losing their shirt; people in between jobs can feel free to spend time looking for options they can tolerate. Basic jobs solves none of these problems, and maintains the time pressures that prevent people from exploring interesting ideas or realizing their full potential."

These things could also be achieved with government spending into things like: better unemployment guarantees, grants for entrepreneurs, or low-interest no-nonsense business loans.

How does basic income solve the problem? If the income just covers expenses, where do you get the money on top of your BI to be an entrepreneur?

> better unemployment guarantees

I don't know what you mean here.

> grants for entrepreneurs

You have to apply for grants, with a business idea that someone else has to consider sound. Not that good for trying out "crazy ideas" as the article mentioned.

> low-interest no-nonsense business loans

A loan is still a loan and doesn't abolish the "constant pressure of losing their shirt" the article mentioned.

Free money without strings attached gives you more freedom than non-free money with strings attached, I'm not sure why we're even arguing about that.

> If the income just covers expenses, where do you get the money on top of your BI to be an entrepreneur?

Well, you won't be able to build a semiconductor factory in your bedroom on the UBI, but neither will you get a grant or no-nonsense business loan for that. The UBI can help entrepreneurs in industries with low capital requirements, like software development. A few people with laptops getting together and developing the next Angry Birds or Facebook or whatnot.

As for how you get more money to have more starting capital, there can still be grants and loans and stuff, why wouldn't there be? Banks will continue to exist and will need to loan their money out. But also, you could get a job and earn money, like today, and save up. Or get a part-time job or whatever.

> Entrepreneurs can feel free to try out crazy ideas without the constant pressure of losing their shirt;

Not sure where that "extrapolation" comes from.

> people in between jobs can feel free to spend time looking for options they can tolerate.

This doesn't seem to apply to the people such a program is aimed at.

> Basic jobs solves none of these problems

These aren't the problems the program addressed in the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Who can follow this twisted path to no conclusion?

From the topical post:

> I once read an economist discussing why unemployment exists at all.

That's the kind of gem that's supposed to mean something, while steering the discussion.

> Jobs are actually a big cause of poverty

Revising "living" to be "working" is so toxic, as to highlight this is a giant troll.

This article shows some select ignorance and is peppered with lies.

I've been somewhat blessed that my first interaction with government income didn't happen until last year, when the company I was working for shut down unexpectedly (I came in to work on Tuesday morning, joined a conference call where they announced that we were all terminated, effective immediately). Although I didn't expect to be out of work long, this was right before Thanksgiving, so I didn't expect to find anything until January at the earliest, and filed for unemployment - after all, that's what it's there for, right? Of course, the application process was ridiculously complicated and poorly documented, but I got through it and started collecting, I think, something like $500/week (which I still owed income tax on). Well, better than nothing, I guess. There's a seemingly perfectly reasonable requirement, though, that while you're collecting unemployment, you have to make 5 job-search contacts per week. Of course, it's entirely unclear what constitutes a job-search contact or how you're supposed to report them. Or what, exactly, happens if you fall short. Well, I got a job offer not too long afterward, but there was a two-week waiting period while they completed a background check on me. But I was stil collecting unemployment during that two weeks, as I was, after all, still unemployed. So, am I supposed to keep making job-search contacts? Of course, nobody could give me a straight answer (and you'll be on hold for hours trying to get in touch with somebody). So, to be on the safe side, I kept sending out resumes to companies that I had no intention of following through with just to comply with what seemed to be a legal requirement. This sort of well-intentioned, but one-size-fits-all sort of hidden regulation is exactly what concerns me about any government income program... they can't make the rules too clear because if they did, clever people would have an easier time taking advantage.

> This sort of well-intentioned, but one-size-fits-all sort of hidden regulation is exactly what concerns me about any government income program... they can't make the rules too clear because if they did, clever people would have an easier time taking advantage.

That problem seems to be an aspect of the broader problem with conditional government income programs that unconditional basic income is aimed right at the heart of.

It's very hard to game a rule of, e.g., ”If you are a citizen or lawful permanent resident, you get exactly $X/month” doesn't have a lot of room for manipulation, despite being quite clear.

> If you are a citizen or lawful permanent resident

I see a flaw right there...

What's the flaw?

You do realize that the universal basic income is the exact opposite of what you describe? The "universal" part means that you get money without any requirements, without any forms to fill out (except to prove once that you exist and have a bank account, I guess), without any rules.

UBI wants to get away from all the unclear rules and the hassle and cost of enforcing them.

It is not unheard of for people to collect money for people who don't exist. It used to be popular in the US to claim extra dependents on one's taxes. It might be going too far to present basic income as a totally foolproof program.

Of course it has to be implemented well and must rely on some other (important) assumption like "social security numbers belong to actually living persons".

Unemployment Insurance suffers from over-protectionism due to "Protestant values". Because "work" is virtuous, not working is "sinful", so you must prove you aren't entirely a sinner.

Despite the fact that every dollar you get back out of the Unemployment Insurance pool was most likely a dollar you put into the pool, people want to make sure you aren't just "wasting" resources.

If there is a better example for why the U in UBI needs to be truly Universal for it to really work, it's unemployment insurance. The more gatekeeping in a Basic Income scheme, the more likely it is to bring in human biases and human judgment calls. A lot of UBI complaints are the same "Protestant values" fights: "why should people do the godly thing and work themselves hard to death if you give them the basics for free?" Not everyone believes that work is godly, but yet we've commonly voted those that do in charge of what should be unbiased protection systems like Unemployment Insurance (and Social Security and Medicare, etc), and we've let them dominate the conversations.

And with all of that it is worth keeping in mind that these complications cause unemployment insurance to have average failure rates of around 20 percent. This means that overall roughly one in five who qualify and apply correctly receive no benefits and roughly one in five who should be disqualified but apply receive benefits anyway. This kind of error is what makes the simple universal basic income citizen dividend benefit such a compelling alternative: We can actually do it with relatively low error rates and high transparency.

FYI China has had a similar concept for a while now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_rice_bowl

Basic Income is a technology problem, it will come one day. But not now.

You have this completely backwards. Technology is making the lack of strong UBI a potentially bad situation. UBI is simply redistribution of surplus, this would consist of say bread and water in the middle ages, to healthcare today. The lack of UBI does not indicate a lack of technology but a lack collective social conscience.

I have not seen anyone else mention it, but I think there is a significant factor in the resistance of elites to UBI that they will not admit, but is important to think about. I don't think the cost of UBI is at issue per se, but the social consequences. They may well consider that UBI would lead to a significant increase in the number of idle people, and idle people are more likely to become restive. Not being hungry may prevent riots, but so does having something to do all day. From the point of view of a billionaire, it may not be all about whether they have $10 billion or $11 billion, but rather what maintains the social order.

UBI will only be truly implementable when we have robots automating everything.

We do not need government involved in basic income. We only need capital. See https://www.mannabase.com/

Universal income should be universal, not contingent on creating state slavery as a precursor to full out socialism.

Full out socialism is and has always been based on earning wages by working. The UBI is very much the opposite of socialism in this regard.

I wrote the article he is responding to. My reply is here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-...

In the other article you'd like to see refuted, you're mostly attacking windmills. I've led many UBI discussions, and never ever have I met a UBI proponent who said that people with medical needs should have their health insurance taken away and replaced by the same UBI amount healthy people get.

For other things you point out the solution yourself, like conservatorship, which exists.

Yet another point is the old "they will just drink booze all day and sit in front of the TV". Which is certainly true for some people, and empirically known to be false for others. Lots of people are rich enough to drop their job and switch to drinking and TV all day... yet we know that they don't.

> you're mostly attacking windmills

Or strawmen, rather. (Too late to edit.)

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