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Comment by draq | Hacker News Reader

Basic income for everyone does indeed seem reasonable to me. If new technology drastically reduces the amount of labour, it seems obviously fair that everyone should be eligible to profit from its benefits. If 2% of the population can provide food for the whole society, maybe another 30% (a number to be drastically reduced by new technology) needed to maintain the social and economical infrastructure, then we will have a majority of people whose economic output is not required. Those people, e.g. children, retirees, handicapped, people with illness, etc. need means to live a decent life. To excessively burden the relatives of those people seems to be an arbitrary and cruel neglect of the society to care for its members.

The argument against basic income is the same as for IP laws. Without money or legal constructs to monetize their products, people have no incentives to work. Maybe we need better incentives for working and creating things.

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I would argue that it's not obviously fair that everyone should profit from it. What incentives do people have to make new technologies that drastically increase labor if they cannot be paid for inventing them? People should only invent to serve their fellow men, and receive no compensation for their efforts?

If they do deserve compensation for their efforts, how do you do that aside from "capitalism"? In a capitalist society if you can make more things from less resources, you should (everything else being equal) reap higher profits. That's your compensation for your invention. In the absence of such a mechanism, what is the fair price for an invention? Who decides?

The incentive to work is you make more money.

Everyone gets basic income, regardless of other income. It isn't taxed because taxing what the government gives just so it can redistribute again later is stupid.

If you earn additional income above the government provided basic income, you pay taxes on it, on a sliding scale. The more you make, the higher the rate you pay. The rich who work for their wealth are still rich, but the gaps between their wealth and the "poor" who only receive basic income is made smaller, and no matter what, everyone has enough to live.

Sure, but who decides what the right number is for a basic income? No matter what number you pick there will be a portion of the population who sees that number as "good enough" and will cease to work.

As the basic income grows, more people will choose not to work. This is good as it reduces the supply of labor, thus increasing the wages of those who do work. But it also reduces the amount of income available for taxation, as this basic income isn't taxed. And as the tax base is reduced through a higher basic income, more money is needed to pay that basic income. That drives up the tax rate. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to find yourself in a situation where the math simply doesn't work.

This analysis also neglects the increase in prices that might accompany such a system. The higher the basic income the more likely you are to see an increase in prices that guts the effectiveness of the basic income.

> Sure, but who decides what the right number is for a basic income? No matter what number you pick there will be a portion of the population who sees that number as "good enough" and will cease to work.

This is, to an extent, self-controlling because people opting out of the labor pool decreases the size of the pool, increases the market-clearing price for labor, and increases the incentive to opt in to the labor pool.

The other thing is that it gives people more freedom to undertake speculative efforts (you still need to get funding to meet any costs of the effort itself, assuming that basic income isn't high enough to provide a surplus that can be used for that purpose, but you don't need as much savings to meet your own living expenses while undertaking a speculative effort.) Opting out of the conventional labor market doesn't necessarily mean opting out of work.

> This is good as it reduces the supply of labor, thus increasing the wages of those who do work. But it also reduces the amount of income available for taxation, as this basic income isn't taxed.

Its not clear that this is the case: sure, those who opt out of work will no longer be paying income taxes, but, as you note, wages for those who work are driven up by supply -- which also increases the total amount of income taxes paid by those who work. What effect this has in total is unpredictable; it seems intuitively likely that overall labor-derived income would drop, which would be expected to drop income tax revenues in a flat tax regime, but its also likely those dropping out would be on the lower end of the labor-derived income scale, and in a progressive tax system, that, combined with increased wages for workers, could still increase overall income tax revenues.

"Sure, but who decides what the right number is for a basic income?"

I addressed a very similar question in an earlier thread on topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5658967). It's short and directly applicable enough I'll just copy:

Like any policy question, the answer is:

Ideally, the level will be set to what will produce the best outcome based on our current understanding of the world, where the precise parameters under which 'best' is determined is negotiated through a fair political and/or economic process.

In practice, the question is how we best approximate that. The shape of that should be informed by economics, and will likely depend on the particular country.

All of that said, I agree it's a key factor to look at when assessing a particular BI proposal; I don't think it's an unanswerable question.

Okay, I get it. I think it's basically unanswerable but I'm happy to agree to disagree.

It's no more unanswerable than interest rates or tax levels. You tweak the knob until you get the result you want.

Maybe we won't get it exactly right, but I think the answer is greater than 0 which means right now, we're doing it wrong.

What draq is saying, is that in this system, you still are compensated for your efforts of squeezing out additional profits- by inventing or any other process that leads to increased efficiency and profits. The compensation is just, "less". There is still an incentive to work, but there should not be the huge disparity of wealth we have now.

There's a difference between everyone getting some money and some kind of pure communism. Proposals for a basic income aren't arguing that in a 10m-population country, each person's basic income will be equal to 1/10m of GDP.

In addition, many of the gains from technological advances are currently not reaped by the people who actually produce them, because technology is a very interlocked system, and monetization does not track it perfectly. For example, some technologies are produced by a chain involving basic-science research, applied-science research, engineering R&D, and product research, but the earlier parts of that chain are, in many cases, not really cut in on the profits. Sometimes that's because basic science/math is not patentable, partly b/c capturing every bit of value you create is in practice difficult, and partly because there is no good mechanism for capturing longer-term value, e.g. if you invent something today which produces a commercializable product in 30 years, any patent will have expired.

Sometimes that's a good thing: the general technological level increases, and technologies become essentially owned by humanity in general. But "owned by humanity in general" is a fairly nebulous concept, since they don't necessarily benefit people equally: the people best posed to benefit from the common heritage of previous generations' technological advances are those with sufficient wealth to utilize them, e.g. to build new technologies on them or factories to produce them. (Admittedly not always... whether new technologies tend to concentrate wealth or dissipate it varies and depends on a lot of factors.)

Dystopian fiction fairly often poses this thought experiment: Take a situation where all human food needs can eventually be produced by purely mechanized means, and that this has been the case for 100 or 200 years. Does this mean all human food needs are solved? Not if the land and robots are owned by a small subset of humans: in that case you have the strange result that a subset of humans has control over all the food, even though they neither produce the food by their own labor, nor invented the technology that produces the food.

Overall, I don't think the basic-income solution is a particularly radical one. If robots are doing an increasing amount of work, and some portion of today's robots are the result of our common ancestors' ingenuity, it's a really rough floor function on "what portion of robot labor should go to human X?". So everyone gets at least some smallish portion of the robots' output, or put differently, a smallish portion of the automation dividend. Then the rest can be allocated with regular market mechanisms. (One advantage from a pro-market position is that a basic income might remove political pressure for other kinds of social-support policies that interfere with markets more, like making it hard to fire people.)

Guaranteed basic income doesn't mean guaranteed employment. So if you invent something that lets me get rid of 90% of my work force, I can still buy it from you, fire my people, and you can still get rich.

If we're talking about incentives, I don't think we need capitalism to provide sufficient incentives. Humans are weird creatures. We don't care about absolute wealth so much as we care about relative wealth (processing in relative terms is deeply ingrained into the human thought process at every level). I bet a society with no more than 10 different income levels, set based on productivity, would provide sufficient incentive to get nearly everyone to contribute at near peak capacity.

In the US, we have more than 10 different income levels and a basic consumption guarantee of about 20k/year (i.e., even people earning $0/year tend to consume about $20k/year).

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

This doesn't stop large chunks of our society from opting out of work.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2010.pdf

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Does that mean, on average, the minimum anual pay to get someone off the couch in the U.S. is $20K+? My wife is from Colombia, and she tells me people there are motivated to go work and hustle each day for a few bucks. Of course that's off the books. I wonder how off the books work, if counted, would change those U.S. statistics?

As anyone who ever engaged in meaningful activity can tell you, such activity is its own reward. If you're not inventing something to solve a problem you have, or that someone whom you would like to help has, but ONLY to make profit, it will sooner or later show in the inventions you make, and in the world shaped by them, too.

Serious question: How to reconcile BI with more liberal immigration laws?

I see a benefit of BI, but I personally see a larger benefit of allowing open immigration (else you have large inequalities based on country of origin).

The problem with "basic income" as I see it is people's ideas about what a proper standard of living is completely subjective. Should a basic income cover an apartment, or a house? Should it cover cheap food or expensive organic food? Should it cover technological gadgetry, and if so, how much? What type of car is "fair" for someone to be given? How do we ensure people's standard of living doesn't continue to increase. Will we not always have someone with more money to compare ourselves to? It's the nebulous definition of what a "basic income" should be that has me worried about the whole concept.

Basic income would make sustained immigration untenable. Our society depends on diversity and vibrancy; we can't put a price tag on human beings.

Technology doesn't drop from the sky, like everything else it is created (or farmed, or dug up from the earth) and rightfully belongs to its creator.

Yes, that is why whenever you invent something independently you're fucked because of this nasty thing called "the patent system" that essentially guarantees that most things you create already belong to someone else.

All inventions are built on those that came before them. How much iteration defines a new invention?

In some ways yes, but if you mean intellectual property then no.

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