Y Combinator Learns Basic Income Is Not So Basic After All

Heavily discussed 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17851511

I like the idea and I applaud money being spent to investigate this, but this isn't gonna work.

Testing basic income in an environment where BI doesn't universally exist isn't going to yield any fruitful conclusions. The conclusions will be caveated with "we gave basic income to people who's peers don't have basic income and that could alter the results". This is why economics is such a difficult practice to comprehend because behaviors don't work in a vacuum (read anything by Kahneman and you'll understand).

On the other hand, if this at least gets the population to think UBI makes sense, even if we can't unilaterally test it properly, then I think that's a good thing.

Very exciting! While, I do believe basic-income is a part of the future, it MUST be paired with providing other social goods. Public school, single payer healthcare, cheap & healthy food, cheap housing, etc.

Without these necessities also being taken care of, there's a good chance people will still not be able to make ends meet.

Seems likely that if a $$ value was ever set for basic-income it would be very hard to move it. We could also try and set it so it always changes and is based upon cost-of-living. That itself is tough though since cost-of-living varies so drastically.

Will recipients need to treat these outlays as taxable income? If so, it’s worth bearing in mind that many of the eligible people will face a very high marginal tax rate [0] if they lose access to government problems as a result, especially if one or both of the chosen states didn’t expand Medicaid under the ACA [1].

[0] https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2018/06/an-effective-margina...

[1] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/the-coverage-gap-un...

IMHO for basic income to succeed esp the supplemental 1k type ine should have more options of partial work. For instance I would like to work only 3 days a week and building something useful or contributing to a social cause rest of the week knowing I have a cushion of basic income. But the flip side is many companies won't be willing to offer such jobs. At least I am not sure what value I can add to society through this extra income if I still have to work 40 hrs a week.

I have a feeling that Basic Income will be a societal upgrade and people will still work, but I don't think it's going to solve wealth disparity. My gut says that it will actually make disparity more obvious, just people at the bottom won't be struggling as hard. Anyways, this is mere speculation. What do I know?

Dupe, comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17851511

The project homepage with details and FAQ https://basicincome.ycr.org/

This is great! Kind of shocked that capitalism is looking to solve the governments problem. Things are changing.

Since it's paywalled:

https://www.wired.com/story/y-combinator-learns-basic-income...