Basic Income as Common Dividends: Piloting a Transformative Policy
thersa.org
thersa.org
I think governments should provide free education and healthcare to everyone and peg the prices of housing to some standard price index. That's it. No blanket free money.
The way things are right now, if you qualify for benefits, you can get thousands of dollars a year in free stuff. If you take any full time job, you immediately lose most of the benefits.
If you give people the choice between free stuff where they can do whatever they want all day vs. working 40 hours to get substantially the same thing, no kidding there aren't a lot of takers for the option to work full time in exchange for what amounts to a gain of only around $5000/year.
The point of a UBI being universal is that you don't get that perverse incentive. There is no means testing, you don't lose the benefit from taking the job, so a job that pays $20,000/year after taxes gives you $20,000 in additional money, not $5000 because taking the job costs you $15,000 in benefits.
The paradox at the center of UBI goes like this: by definition, UBI would pay out an equal, base minimum to everybody; it cannot pay out different amounts to different people. That base minimum will be a comfortable minimum to some (who will spend their days playing video games or similar) and an uncomfortable minimum to others (who will choose to work to earn beyond the UBI). Where do you draw the line? Should UBI be a comfortable minimum for 50% of the population? 20%? Less? How many people do you "write off" from participating in the economy? If the number is too low, and UBI doesn't really provide enough people with enough money to live a basic lifestyle, have you really made a difference at all with UBI?
Suppose that it's not, at scale. Then the work still needs to be done, so wage rise until it is enough for enough people. That seems like more of a benefit than a problem.
> There's an old parable about a fisherman taking on debt to start a business to grow a fishing fleet so that he can eventually sell the business and retire to spend his days fishing.
That's kind of the point.
You want to go fishing but you don't have a boat. Boats are expensive and you don't have enough money. So you borrow money to buy five fishing boats so you can make enough back to own one of them outright. Then you do and you can go fishing.
If you give the fisherman the first boat to begin with, he doesn't go out and build a fleet, but he's still a fisherman. But there is nothing wrong with being a fisherman. This is the basic trade off in having social programs at all instead of pure ruthless capitalism.
Presumably the real problem is with the people who choose to do things that are totally useless/harmful rather than the people who choose to be fishermen. But is that really a novel problem? Is it "optimal" for people to go home after work and play video games instead of working more? What about developing video games? What about growing tobacco, or mining coal, or building bombs? There are a lot more counter-productive things than sitting in a room and effectively doing nothing.
> How many people do you "write off" from participating in the economy? If the number is too low, and UBI doesn't really provide enough people with enough money to live a basic lifestyle, have you really made a difference at all with UBI?
Your assumption seems to be that the purpose of a UBI is to provide people with a basic lifestyle with zero supplemental income. But it doesn't need to do that at all. There is no inherent requirement that it provide any given level of support. It would be a great improvement if all it did was provide exactly the same level of support as existing welfare, but provided it in cash instead of with strings attached, and had no phase out so that low and middle income working people received a little more at the expense of the rich.
It could provide enough to live a basic lifestyle for some percentage of people, but the number depends on how many people you actually need to work. If more jobs get replaced by robots, the number of people we need to provide all the necessities of life goes down, and why shouldn't we allow more people to only work if they want to? The amount can start off modest and increase to the extent that things actually go that way.
That's a really big and unfounded assumption. Especially here on HN it's a well-known trope that employers complain that they can't find any engineers when really they can't find any engineers at the price they're willing to pay. Not to mention that there are ceilings for the price of labor - the money for salaries doesn't come from thin air; it generally comes from higher prices. If prices can't raise to the level needed to support the necessary salary, the business and product simply won't exist. Whether this will result, under UBI, in creative destruction, a death spiral for the economy, or it simply won't be a problem at all since people will keep showing up to work anyway, is quite frankly a matter of faith at this point.
> If you give the fisherman the first boat to begin with, he doesn't go out and build a fleet, but he's still a fisherman. But there is nothing wrong with being a fisherman. This is the basic trade off in having social programs at all instead of pure ruthless capitalism.
Yes, there is something wrong with just being a fisherman. When the fisherman starts a business and grows a fishing fleet, the fisherman creates jobs. If the fisherman just stays a fisherman, those jobs never get created. If most people aren't working, you don't have a tax base to fund UBI (or any other social welfare program) in the first place. If people would rather not work, then adopting UBI is more likely to result in the collapse of the economy, not strengthen it.
> Is it "optimal" for people to go home after work and play video games instead of working more?
As a matter of fact, yes, because occasional rest and relaxation is an important part of sustaining yourself in the marathon that is your working years. If you wreck your work/life balance with no end in sight then you're going to burn out pretty quickly.
> What about developing video games? What about growing tobacco, or mining coal, or building bombs? There are a lot more counter-productive things than sitting in a room and effectively doing nothing.
UBI doesn't address any of these issues. They'd all still offer some kind of compensation anyway. If society deems them to be counter-productive, there are other means of countering them - tax policy etc.
> It would be a great improvement if all it did was provide exactly the same level of support as existing welfare, but provided it in cash instead of with strings attached
This is naive. Food stamps are intended to ensure that people are fed. Housing vouchers are intended to ensure that people have a roof over their heads. If you give people cash instead of food stamps and housing vouchers, people will either have food in their bellies and a roof over their heads, or they won't. If they won't then the moral case for UBI no longer exists (because the moral case for welfare programs will no longer exist). If they will then we're back to the original argument over whether UBI will motivate or demotivate people to work. That UBI costs much less to administer is more or less a fringe benefit compared to the risk that UBI poses to crashing the economy.
> If more jobs get replaced by robots
Much hype and lost in transit. Most of the gains in automation are due to growth in technology firms, not robots; most of the losses in manufacturing are due to globalization, not robots. There's little evidence showing this to be feasible.
And everybody knows they're just saying that to try to import more labor to suppress wages. But then they pay the higher price anyway, which is why engineers are well compensated.
> Not to mention that there are ceilings for the price of labor - the money for salaries doesn't come from thin air; it generally comes from higher prices.
It can also come from lower corporate margins, but suppose it comes from higher prices. Then some things cost more and there is all the more incentive for people to continue to work because now they need more money to buy the things they want.
> If prices can't raise to the level needed to support the necessary salary, the business and product simply won't exist.
Only things that wouldn't exist without access to cheap labor, i.e. things with little marginal utility to begin with.
> Whether this will result, under UBI, in creative destruction, a death spiral for the economy, or it simply won't be a problem at all since people will keep showing up to work anyway, is quite frankly a matter of faith at this point.
It is basically impossible for that to happen from a UBI that only replaces the existing welfare system at the same level of benefits, because it would then provide less disincentive to work than the existing system that conditions benefits on not making money.
At that point you can raise the amount gradually and measure the results over time to ensure that you're not doing anything problematic. It's obvious that there is some amount which is "too high" -- it can't be a million dollars a year in current dollars. But it's possible to find the optimal number gradually by experiment without taking any kind of major risk because you're never making a large disruptive change all at once.
> Yes, there is something wrong with just being a fisherman. When the fisherman starts a business and grows a fishing fleet, the fisherman creates jobs. If the fisherman just stays a fisherman, those jobs never get created.
Except that they do, because the other people also want to be fisherman, but now they all get to be their own boss because they have the money to buy their own boat instead of having to work for somebody else.
> As a matter of fact, yes, because occasional rest and relaxation is an important part of sustaining yourself in the marathon that is your working years. If you wreck your work/life balance with no end in sight then you're going to burn out pretty quickly.
That's bad for you, not necessarily bad for the economy. Presumably more widgets get made if you work 100 hour weeks and then have a two week breakdown every six months than if you only work 40 hours the whole time.
Those conditions would cause you to quit if you had a better option, but that's the point. Give people a better alternative and they can negotiate better working conditions. Some things have human value in excess of their measure in business productivity.
> UBI doesn't address any of these issues. They'd all still offer some kind of compensation anyway. If society deems them to be counter-productive, there are other means of countering them - tax policy etc.
The point isn't that a UBI solves climate change, it's that some jobs aren't actually better than doing nothing -- and many of them exist primarily so that people can have jobs. The big lobby for coal is the coal miners who don't want to lose their jobs. It would be better if they would all stay home and play video games -- and then we could actually pass that law taxing carbon because they would no longer be worried about losing their jobs.
> Food stamps are intended to ensure that people are fed. Housing vouchers are intended to ensure that people have a roof over their heads. If you give people cash instead of food stamps and housing vouchers, people will either have food in their bellies and a roof over their heads, or they won't. If they won't then the moral case for UBI no longer exists (because the moral case for welfare programs will no longer exist). If they will then we're back to the original argument over whether UBI will motivate or demotivate people to work.
If it provides the same level of assistance as existing programs that it replaces then it can't reasonably provide less incentive to work than the existing programs.
> Most of the gains in automation are due to growth in technology firms, not robots; most of the losses in manufacturing are due to globalization, not robots. There's little evidence showing this to be feasible.
In 1790 more than 90% of the labor force consisted of farmers. Today it's less than 3%. The difference is a result of robots and machines and computers and automation.
The people who used to be farmers went on to find other jobs, but a lot of the jobs are garbage. We don't need any coal miners whatsoever. We could do with not so many people in advertising. A lot of these jobs either exist solely to give people jobs, or exist only to counteract the same position at a competitor, because if your competitor hires advertisers you have to do the same or lose business. All those people could sit at home and the world would barely even notice -- or would be happier for it.
The jobs we really need are the people doing things that are important. But those are also the jobs that will always get done because they're important, so they can justify more compensation than is necessary to attract workers. They also tend to be the jobs it's easiest to get people to do, because people actually like jobs where they know they're making a difference instead of fiddling with the color scheme of cheap plastic garbage that will be in a landfill in six months.
My idea (disclaimer: not an economist, sociologist, etc just some guy on the internet): Free (i.e. public funded) education at all levels, healthcare, mass transit & access to public housing at restricted cost (we already have that in many western countries but means-test who can get into public housing & do not build nearly enough of it).
stuff like unemployment payments can stay but all other benefits are no longer required as they are provided to everyone. And make sure that each 1$ you earn reduces your benefits by less than 1$ (maybe 50 cents) so that you're never disincentivized from taking work.
The chronically unemployed in socialist Western Europe will remain at a situation more or less the same as they are in now but will have lower bureaucratic overhead & be less disincentivized from searching even part time work.
It's the working poor to lower/middle class that just about keep their head above the water that will be in a much better position.
And for the well off it will be more or less the same as now only they'll pay some more taxes (but also benefit from the services above, like free education).
This is more or less how Australian dole works, and when you hit the income band where your payments start decreasing you lose anywhere up to 70 or 80% of marginal increases in income to the government, if you include tax.
At that point a rational person could and does question whether working an extra 6 hour shift for $4/hr take home pay is worth it.
There are two possibilities when you provide stuff instead of money. One is that people actually need the exact specific stuff you're providing. They want to live in government housing and eat government cheese; it's what they would choose if you just gave them the money. But then there is zero difference between that and giving them the money. You're not keeping them from using the money to buy drugs or whatever because giving them $500 worth of housing means they have $500 of their other money they didn't have to use for housing that they can go use to buy drugs.
The other option is that they wouldn't buy the same stuff, in which case the restriction is waste. You give them government housing 30 miles from where they work even though the non-government housing across the street from their job is higher quality and has a lower underlying cost. You deprive them of the option of living in a smaller space in order to use the money for something more productive -- or the other way around, renting a place slightly larger than the allocated government housing unit so it can be used as a studio or home office.
You're basically assuming that the government can do better than the market. That may actually be true for things like mass transit with huge up-front costs and trivially small incremental costs per rider, but there is no reason to expect it to be for things like housing and education. (In practice, existing government involvement in both of those markets has done nothing but inflate costs dramatically.)
> And make sure that each 1$ you earn reduces your benefits by less than 1$ (maybe 50 cents) so that you're never disincentivized from taking work.
50% is still crazy high. There is no reason the poor should be paying higher marginal rates than the rich.
> It's the working poor to lower/middle class that just about keep their head above the water that will be in a much better position.
This really has more to do with how redistributive a policy is than what (as opposed to who) the resources are allocated to. The ways to help lower/middle class people are to give them more money (independent of which form, but very expensive and hard to pass) or to use the specified amount of money more efficiently so that the same dollar goes further, which is what you get from a UBI instead ordering people to buy specific stuff.
here in Germany education is (mostly) government funded and for the majority of students studying in public universities is free or very cheap. The American model of just providing backing for student loans is the broken one.
When I did my M.Sc. in Austria I paid €350 per semester for another example of publicly funded higher education not making education expensive.
I would agree with that assessment. Convincing the government to subsidize loan interest for education and housing is one of the nastiest tricks the banks pulled on the American people.
But the point is that those markets would be more efficient if the government had left them alone.
> When I did my M.Sc. in Austria I paid €350 per semester for another example of publicly funded higher education not making education expensive.
That's the out of pocket cost, then how much did it cost in tax dollars on top of that? I assume still less than in the US, because the banks did such a number on the US, but I doubt any better than schools in ordinary markets without that level of crazy.
The argument is that society as a whole benefits from a better educated/more healthy/etc population so even tho it will cost you some tax money in the greater scheme of things as a whole we will benefit.
If this means e.g. a 20% premium on the cost of education or healthcare I'd be willing to accept that. If it's 10x the cost that's obviously a different story. But we don't actually know the scale of the effect.
The video states that 60% of the wealth in the U.K. is inherited, which is essentially free money for the receiver. Why is it okay for rich people to receive free money but not everyday people?
I hate statements like this because they are completely misleading. other similar ones like "top 1 % controls ~50 % of wealth" etc.
This goes by networth. Imagine this, there are about 20 million college students, nearly all of then have a negative net worth. By that logic, if you hand a homeless person a single $ bill, they 'control' the wealth of at least 20 million Americans. you can add in tons of americans who have a positive net worth to make up for all that negative net worth. Its an absurd way of thinking. its especially problematic since most net worth is paper net worth (stocks that not even the owners can really touch).
Surely someone who just graduated college and has 100k negative net worth is far better off than a starving person in a desert, distended belly and all.
And a big part of that is just the way we do the accounting. If you put the degree on the balance sheet as an asset it would change everything.
also networth is just a terrible metric. it ignores income streams, it ignores things that produce income like degrees, etc. it over inflates paper wealth as mentioned before.
I'm not saying this is fair, not saying the parent post is right, but motivating people to do useful things for society after an UBI would be a concearn.
None of the UBI experiments show people that receive UBI participate in the labor market at lower rates. This is not a data-driven concern. All date points to this not being a problem.
My understanding is that all experiments were time-limited and the participants knew that at the end of 5 years they would be on their own. Makes one approach life in the short run very differently.
Passing wealth down obviously drives inequality but i cannot see a sane proposal to mitigate the impact. The more difficult you make it the more likely it is that only the very wealthy are able to pass on wealth. It is also obviously very unpopular with parents to suggest they cannot provide for their children.
Are there good ideas around?
Remember the context this is discussed at, the inheritance tax will not be the only change: the point is to make basics like housing affordable to everyone.
You will still have 0.5 * house-value more than someone who had no inheritance & is supposedly also meant to afford housing.
Or would government buy out his house, ending up with shit ton of undesirable property in the long run?
Congratulations, now your parents are dead and you have debt on your hands with major headache.
.. unless they just gifted the house to their kid once they reached old age. Then your law is meaningless. Unless you want to tax any gift in the family through the nose?
While rich people you were going after solved the issue with all sorts of trust funds, gifting and clever employment schemes.
So you gain nothing and people who were already disadvantaged loose. Yay.
Because consent of the giving person is present in the inheritance case but not in case of the government redistribution?
You too can build wealth for your children and grandchildren. All my grandparents were farmers, and most of their grandchildren have university degrees and a very good wage. I'm sure our grandchildren will have the means to start companies.
The western world is sometimes too focused on individuals, but make no mistake, wealth is build over generations. And I don't see the issue with that.
By why should this be allowed? By what right does there exist more than a life estate in any property? Fee simple ownership is administratively simpler which clearly has short term benefits, but absent some corrective mechanism to mitigate generational wealth fee simple ownership is thanatocracy; rule by the dead.
> The western world is sometimes too focused on individuals, but make no mistake, wealth is build over generations. And I don't see the issue with that.
The inherent consequence of significant wealth (for a small minority) being built over generations is the inherited disadvantages of poverty for a larger number. Generational wealth and equality of opportunity are mutually incompatible.
Because I want my genes to have a higher chance to survive. It's pretty natural.
> Generational wealth and equality of opportunity are mutually incompatible.
That is true. But there are degrees in which you can enforce this. I'm very much a proponent of the European educational system, where there are more fair educational chances for everyone (compared to the US). This creates equality of opportunity on an educational level.
But I don't agree with high taxes on inheritance. That's not possible anyway. Rich business owners have plenty of ways to pass on wealth to their children without it being considered as inheritance. When you would have high taxes, or even discard inheritance, then you would only hurt the middle class.
Either way, the recipient didn't work for it. It spends the same.
You just want to be able to dictate how other people live; that's fundamentally anti-freedom. It's not a good position to take.
People can choose to not work, but that also means they choose to not earn money. It's pretty simple. Freedom is about choice. But choices have consequences. You cannot choose one thing, but then still expect to not have the drawback of that choice.
If you like freedom so much, then why do I have to pay for people that don't produce anything for society? You are taking my freedom away from earning the money that I earn.
And if the majority of people would not work, who will make your bread, your computer, your computer games, your electricity, your car, ... ?
Good luck in a world full of consumers, but no producers.
Except you can, and these guys are doing exactly that. They're not doing anything criminal. They're not doing anything immoral. They're not doing anything wrong. They're living entirely within the bounds of what society has decided is acceptable. They're living exactly how society allows them to live.
You may believe that welfare is a bad thing, and that society would be better if we just let people who don't have jobs starve to death or something, but society has decided as a collective group that we don't want that. Consequently we allow people to choose not to work. We pay their bills. That's how society works - the majority decides what is or isn't acceptable and enables that behaviour.
My belief if that society is richer by a long way if people can live life on their own terms. I would much rather people lived life on welfare playing video games all day than force those people to work jobs they hate. Sometimes you're just not in the right headspace to work. I took a couple of years off once and lived on my own money because I just didn't want a job any more. If I need welfare to do that again in the future then I will be very glad of it, and I will happily use it without any guilt that I'm not contributing.
And if the majority of people would not work..
Then the system would break down. But please note that hasn't happened. Most people choose to work, because living on welfare kind of sucks. Most people want more than that life affords them. The "what if!" argument doesn't work here because if it was going to happen it would already have happened, and it hasn't.
You're conflating two groups here: A) people who are unable to work or can't find work, and B) people who would be able to work, but choose not to work. Most modern societies have decided to provide welfare to group A, but not group B.
> The "what if!" argument doesn't work here because if it was going to happen it would already have happened, and it hasn't.
You're wrong: No such experiment has been tried (i.e., a UBI guaranteed over many years, to a diverse set of people, sufficiently high to live on), so you can't claim "it would already have happened".
Most societies haven't put measures in place to stop people in group B living on welfare. That is accepting them.
No such experiment has been tried
The "what if" in question was "what if everyone decided to live on welfare", not "what if we had UBI". Everyone could just decide to live on welfare right now, but they haven't.
Uuh, yeah, they have – that's what "means testing" is all about, and that's also what UBI proponents demand: welfare without means testing.
> Everyone could just decide to live on welfare right now, but they haven't.
No, they couldn't – again, because auf means testing. Sure, there are some people that successfully trick, outsmart, or otherwise circumvent the means test, but it's not as simple as "just deciding to live on welfare right now", as you put it.
Yes they do. They have laws and services in place to track down these people. In practice it's now always easy to make the distinction between someone who can't find a job, and someone who doesn't want a job.
Your "it ain't a crime if you don't get caught" theory is not really accepted by society, government or law.
In Belgium that would be considered criminal (fraud), since you can only receive an unemployment fee when you cannot find a job. You have to prove that you are looking for jobs.
If you put yourself out of the job market, that means you are not entitled to receive an unemployment fee.
Enough people need to be willing to do the work to get the work done. Doesn't need to be everyone; that's a fallacy.
Not the same thing. For a trust fund, the parents voluntarily decided to give part of their wealth to their children. For a UBI, I would be forced to give part of my wealth to people who choose not to work.
You could argue about whether it should still be done, but those two cases are not equivalent.
Not everyone needs to work indeed. But again it has 2 sides that are equal: you can only consume what you produce. This works on a large scale, but also on a small scale. Communism has shown that if you take away the small scale, and people are able to consume no matter how much they produce, that production goes down. Which is pretty logical if you think about it.
If an economy enforces some constraint, it's a choice. There are other choices of constraint that would also work.
Insurance is spreading risks, lottery is gambling. These have nothing to do with production or wealth creation.
The successful startup does create a huge amount of wealth, and therefore the owner can probably capture a large part of that wealth.
Asking others to pay for their share has nothing to do with power fantasy. Not everyone wants to work, but everyone requires work to survive.
>If they were coding all day under the guise of "doing a startup" most HN readers would admire them
Well, yeah, duh, if they were coding all day then at least there's a chance they were presumably providing some value back to society in return for public support.
You will always have freeloaders. But it will work if it is only very few of them. It will be much more important to provide somewhat fulfilling jobs to people to encourage working. Because working in a coal mine sucks but having a passion-driven career is actually fun and rewarding.
Giving someone no-strings-attached money to someone will sure improve their lives, at least for a short moment.
With cash, the recipient gets $20 worth of value to spend on what they need most. They don't need to barter the asset they received, they can directly participate in consumer markets to get what they need. We also already have the mechanism to generate these cash flows, in the form of interest and dividends on capital assets.
I'm all for tangible assets, but I believe that a majority of people will be against it.
Having a WBS in Berlin is far from ensuring you actually get housing.
> Having a WBS in Berlin is far from ensuring you actually get housing.
That's true, but that's because of the limit of existing apartments, not because the government doesn't pay for it. Similarly, the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a change in the housing market (that is: more building projects in general, but primarily more properties + subsidies given to cooperatives), but it's another issue.
Regarding:
> the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.
It guarantees you will always get treated if you seek such treatment (within reason, basically all actual medical problems will be treated for free here). I had spent 3 weeks in a hospital including numerous tests (MRI, CT, ultrasound) & concluded in brain surgery.
I paid next to nothing & despite nobody being able to guarantee the procedure would be a success I think this is as close as you can reasonably get.
I would be surprised if the same in the US will not have resulted in a hefty bill, even for most people covered under generous employer-backed health insurance.
If we need 4 million apartments, but only 3.5m physically exist, we can't decree the remaining 500k into existance, they still need to be built. They are currently not built for unrelated reasons (city planning, permits, speculation etc), not because "we" (as a society) don't want them to be built. I don't see that changing anytime soon in the large cities, because the population is generally against higher population density, construction projects and longer commutes. Policies will not change that, unless massive changes in laws take away citizen's ability to protest and stop new development projects.
If however, we had government built apartment buildings that could be partitioned out and made available for free only to those who need it, that would actually help solve real problems, and wouldn’t even disrupt those who depend on their property values rising. Imagine such buildings right here in San Francisco.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Life-at-the-bottom-S-F-s...
Moreover, I do not see how this is better than just giving an income. Income is more flexible and fungible. There are already economies of scale in a free market.
The idea of basic income is not equality of outcomes, its equality of opportunity.
The problem I have with most socialist policies is not that funds shouldn't be provided to help the poor/everyone, but because the plans often are designed around the belief that individuals should not be trusted to make decisions about their own lives.
I believe in a fiscally liberal libertarian policy..Federal money should be distributed to individuals and local governments without any strings attached, because only the Federal government has the power of printing currency to meet the public good.
In aggregate, I do trust people to make good decisions, and those that do will get rewarded.
So no food for them for the rest of the month? Good luck with that.
Either people are treated like adults and manage their own finances, or we are all wards of the state to some degree.
This is exactly what happens today, and it's ostensibly the problem that UBI is attempting to solve. If UBI doesn't solve that problem then it's just a very expensive waste of resources.
If they were adults with the ability to manage their finances, make smart decisions etc, only a tiny fraction of them would have to rely on the state in the first place, so that's not convincing to me.
Why? If it’s not being spent on those things anyway isn’t the person just making a financial mistake?
You can't be a free man if your wellbeing 100% depends on someone else's decisions regardless of your actions.
Sounds a lot like we'd just push the problem a few meters away and then run into it again.
Welfare (at least in America) has all the wrong incentives that make it difficult to improve your situation (e.g. lose benefits and all your time if you get a minimum wage job, and who is going to watch the kids now).
The argument for the first approach is that people know better their needs and that money is not enough to cover both while the proponents of the second approach say that it's a false dichotomy, giving money to a poor family without access to healthcare or education is likely to increase the gap between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, etc. So the current cycle we're trying to break, will become more vicious.
I took for granted that we should hand out both, unconditionally.
Which is a silly argument, because anyone who needs those things and is given the equivalent money can use it to buy them.
Indeed, it gives them less opportunity because it deoptimizes what they can use the money for. If you need education, there are merit-based scholarships. There are creative solutions like your father taking a job as a janitor at a university where the children of full-time staff pay no tuition. Or getting a two year degree at a community college which gets you a lower middle class job instead of minimum wage which gets you enough money to pay for a bachelor's degree over a few years in night school. And then you can take the government money as money, save it up and use it to start your own business.
But if the money has to be used for school, then you use it for school, any ingenious alternative method of paying for school is for naught, and you graduate still poor and have to take the first job offer you receive in the rat race because as soon as you get kicked out of the dorms you immediately need first and last month's rent plus the security deposit.
Nothing about BI is silly, BI could make or break our future. All assumptions should be double-tested and nothing should be taken lightly.
> [...] because anyone who needs those things and is given the equivalent money can use it to buy them.
Cancer treatment for example in Europe is mostly mostly free. In Cuba is totally free. In India can be cheap. In US is very expensive.
> Indeed, it gives them less opportunity because it deoptimizes what they can use the money for. If you need education, there are merit-based scholarships.
Scholarships are for the 1% of the population. I am not sure we should take them into account. Plus scholarships are based on scores. A kid growing up in a troubled family has much smaller chance of getting one compared to his peers.
> There are creative solutions like your father taking a job as a janitor at a university where the children of full-time staff pay no tuition.
I'm not sure we're on the same page here, what problem do you think that BI is trying to solve???
Healthcare is a debate unto itself, but the short version is that all else equal a given amount in cash to buy health treatment/insurance should be no worse than the same cost in tax dollars worth of government health coverage, and better because it gives the individual the choice between how high of a deductible they want vs. how much of the premiums they get to keep in their pocket etc.
> Scholarships are for the 1% of the population. I am not sure we should take them into account. Plus scholarships are based on scores. A kid growing up in a troubled family has much smaller chance of getting one compared to his peers.
Every individual thing is for 1% of the population. The point is there are a hundred different things. One person gets a scholarship, another needs food money more than housing money because their aunt lives near the school, another has a brother in the same major and can share books etc.
> I'm not sure we're on the same page here, what problem do you think that BI is trying to solve???
Among other things, it's trying to solve the problem that the only way to get ahead with low resources is to make efficient use of what you have, but assistance that is required to be spent in bureaucratically-specified ways is a de facto prohibition on that.
With your suggestion you assume what people want and provide something that kind of match that (people don’t want a house, they want a specific kind of house at a specific location, same for the clothes), while the basic income approach is just a tool to help people participate in the market, without any guess of what people actually and the full logistical process required to distribute those goods.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/01/24/economy/modern-moneta...