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Comment by konstruktor | Hacker News Reader

> One of the main questions about something like this is about who would do boring, low-paid work with this sort of basic income.

I think that with basic income, this question would not make sense, and that's exactly the reason that I like the idea so much. The reason why people do boring, dirty and dangerous work for little money is that there are folks who have no skills that would enable them to get a more fulfilling, cleaner, safer job that pays more. Those people depend on income, any income, to live, so they do the dirty jobs, and since there is a large pool of these workers, the shitty jobs can even pay just enough to survive.

With a decent basic income scheme, i.e. the basic needs of the people taken care of, the job market would probably flip: You would have to pay people very well for doing unpleasant work, and not so well for fulfilling jobs.

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Unfortunately, there is actual experimental evidence to the contrary. Some of the Arabian Emirates have cash payments to their ethnically Arabian citizens that are practically equivalent to a high basic income.

In those cases, all the "dirty" labor is done by legal/illegal immigrants that are not eligible for said basic income and thus willing to work for much less.

IMO this is the central problem with the idea of a basic income. Either it has to be so low that it is on the "just don't starve" level (thus making it unattractive compared to any job), or you have to lock your borders, shutting down migration.

What happens if you take the implicitly-assumed-to-be-ridiculous third option, and give every visitor a green card and a basic income voucher when they cross the border? Then you don't have any illegal immigrants, just lots and lots and lots of citizens.

(Don't just reply with the obviously-bad first-order effect on the country receiving the immigrants; remember that bad things would also be happening to the labor pools of all countries without this policy.)

I think you raise an interesting point on the second-order effects, but that is only relevant if a big country introduces basic income.

In the case of Switzerland, I think the first-order effect greatly exceeds any other effect on the neighbouring countries's labor pools. Because Switzerland is freaking small (7 million people - the size of a big european city) and is surrounded by large countries (Germany, France, Italy).

So let's say you get 2 millions people from each of the 3 large countries, that's 6 million people. For the large countries, this isn't such a big loss. But for Switzerland, it's almost doubling the population, which is going to be a huge problem in term of finance, housing, transports, etc...

Sure. I actually meant to ask the "if a big country does it" version, because that's what makes Basic Income an interesting macroeconomic policy. If the US did this (and the US definitely has the room--both geographically and otherwise--to absorb way more than 6 million people), what do you think would happen?

Lots and lots of poor, uneducated, unacculturated citizens, and Switzerland quickly turns into Bangladesh. Brilliant idea!

LOL, you just described UK. Multiculturalism doesn't work - it has been tested here.

I wish we could deport racists.

I'm confused, are you accusing the idea that multiculturalism doesn't work as being racist? There is ample evidence that it in fact doesn't work: that an underclass is inevitable and that status applied to an entire culture is immensely damaging.

The idea that there is a "poor, uneducated, unacculturate" immigrant underclass in the UK is a racist lie. Recently arrived immigrants often find themselves at a disadvantage, but 2nd & 3rd generation communities are often wealthier, and better educated than "natives".

Five or ten years ago, I would have told you that this kind of politicised bigotry was entirely outside the British mainstream... only practised by a tiny, shabby fringe. These days, I'm dismayed to admit that the BNP and their UKIP mini-me's have managed to spread their filthy ideas much more widely.

I'm not really familiar with the situation in the UK. My very vague understanding is that the native Britons are so bad, with their chavs and yobs and twelve-year-old moms, that no group of immigrants, no matter how poor or uneducated, could make things worse. [1]

However, it seems to me that you feel so strongly about the issue that, even if immigration did create big social problems that wouldn't otherwise exist, you still would be accusing anyone who pointed that out of being racist. Basically, "that's racist" is not the conclusion of your argument, but rather the premise, and you're using it as a thought-terminating cliché.

Or at least that's my impression as an uninvolved observer, even though I'm more sympathetic to your position.

[1: I hope the British hackers don't get too offended, that was largely tongue-in-cheek.]

Obviously you are right, the situation is more nuanced. However, it's futile to debate those nuances with someone who is simply looking for sound-bites to push a hateful agenda. Example:

"LOL... Multiculturalism doesn't work"

1. I did not expect my comment to get that much attention. 2. My LOL is sarcastic - I am sad that tolerance approached such a level that it hurts the country. 3. That phrase is what the current country leader said: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

When issues are not addressed on time they produce nazi states.

When did 1/3 of Italian or Asian immigrant students support killing in the name of Catholicism or Buddhism?

...when they were asked misleading questions by partisan think tanks?

That dog isn't gonna hunt. You have no evidence that Italian and Asian immigrants espoused violence the way many Muslim immigrants do.

On the flip side, loudmouth, self-appointed, "spokesmen" of the Asian Muslim community such as Mehdi Hasan or Anjem Choudhry really don't help matters very much.

Politicised Islam in Britain - and the associated terrorist actions that result - has done a great deal to generate support for parties and groups such as BNP, UKIP, or EDL.

That's just not true. http://poverty.org.uk/06/index.shtml

Look at the low income rates for Pakistanis and Bengalis. Immigration of those people to the UK is not recent.

I wish we could deport people who throw around the "racist" label casually. There is nothing racist about believing that big, complex, interdependent societies function best when people share basic values, beliefs, and culture. It's the difference between multiculturalism as practiced in the U.S., where e.g. asian immigrants to the west coast have assimilated the basic values of american society while remaining distinctive, and multiculturalism as expressed in the U.K., where e.g. many muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate to the point of wanting to be governed by separate sets of laws.

I would never say people of a minority culture/ethnicity can't be racist against that culture, but I think we often have a more nuanced view of "racism" than people of the majority culture/ethnicity. My family immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh, and integration is an important issue to us. We see a lot of immigrants who refuse to assimilate, and we believe that it's detrimental both for them, because it makes it harder for them to take advantage of all of the opportunities of American society, and detrimental to the people who live around them, because there presence creates cultural schisms within communities that cannot be reconciled. I don't think there is anything "racist" about pointing these basic facts out.

I can assure you, I didn't use the term casually.

> many muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate to the point of wanting to be governed by separate sets of laws

That's a tiny minority of the UK's immigrant community. Drawing general conclusions from such an unrepresentative sample is intellectually dishonest. It's the kind of argument seized upon by hate-mongers.

It seems like you're the ignorant one here.

Center for Social Cohesion: One Third of British Muslim students support killing for Islam

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340599/WikiLeaks-1-...

http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/pdf/IslamonCampus.pdf

One third of British Muslim students say they support killing for Islam. What about their actions, though? Cognitive dissonance is pretty common among religious people. A lot of Christians agree with the statement, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away", but there still aren't many actual eye-gouging cases.

You are seriously quoting The Centre for Social Cohesion (now merged with the Henry Jackson Society - a "neocon think tank" which is connected with that epitome of rational thought, "The Committee on the Present Danger") and the Daily Mail (which needs no introduction)?

And I'm the ignorant one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1he0nxU4FQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgKMI1wV0ps#t=519

(the "soft" examples with some balanced views)

Just go ahead and pretend that this is not a bomb ready to go off in about 10-30 years when the minority becomes the majority.

Then ignore facts and basic crime stats, dangerous religious views being encouraged, increases in violence and hostility, the formation of no-go zones, active tribalism practices amongst the immigrant groups even passed the 3rd generation, rejection of democracy, etc.

Pretend those are all just figments of our imagination.

Then use words like "racist" and "hate-monger" towards anyone that does not subscribe to your fiction.

The truth is a badly implemented immigration policy based on false premises dose nothing but change a society with a few miserable people to a society completely full of miserable people (on both sides - native and non-native).

It does not even matter it is only a "minority"...

It takes 100s of people, and 1000s of man-years, to construct a building.

It takes 1 person 5 minutes and 1 gallon of gasoline to burn that building down.

You do realize that the "But they just can't be like us" argument has been used on nearly every minority ethnicity coming to the US - you can find similar diatribes against Italian and Irish migrants from the turn of the century before they became white.

He just explained how the opposite is true.

No, actually. He used the same argument, siting some group that he thinks has successfully "assimilated" (assimilated is a rather colonialist notion anyway, and the "model minority" concept is hardly racially just) and some group(s) that he thinks can't or won't. But that same argument, well the X were here, but now the Y people just aren't like us and want to stay on their own has been used against the first generation(s) of nearly every immigration wave

> where e.g. many muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate to the point of wanting to be governed by separate sets of laws.

(Mildly interesting that you mention Muslims and sharia, but don't mention Jews and Beth Din).

There are some serious failures of the UK method - faith schools are a scary abomination; Beth Din and Sharia courts have led to child abusers and wife beaters not being reported to police, but just moving to a different part of the country (to continue abusing), women are unable to obtain a religious divorce, etc.

But there is a problem with "assimilation" - it means different things to different people. I'm happy if people can either speak the language or are learning the language or have made some effort to learn the language. And I'd like people to have some understanding of the EU human rights stuff we've signed up to. And I'd prefer people not to wear a full face cover when they're providing me medical treatment. And I'd prefer schools to conform to a national curriculum.

But other people are just racist, and they'll use "assimilation" to complain about other people. They'll often talk about things that just are not true (IMMIGRANTS GET HOUSES QUICKER!!) or they'll confuse terms ("Asylum Seeker" vs "illegal immigrant" vs "immigrant" vs "migrant worker"). As a nasty example of this see the GreenWave group, set up by the far right National Front as a stealth recruiting group, campaigning on ritual slaughter and drawing people into other far right issues once they've signed up.

We address assimilation by giving people a computerised quiz: "Life in the UK".

(https://www.gov.uk/becoming-a-british-citizen/life-in-the-uk...)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_the_United_Kingdom_test)

That's an interesting word - Assimilation. I have no idea if you're maybe trying to rather quote "integration", or if in the UK the word "assimilation" is used some other way then it is in the US, but...

Assimilation is something that the Borg does. It can be forceful and is primarily an act of the collective.

"Integration" on the other hand comes from a desire to be part of a society. It's more of a soft osmosis type effect.

I was quoting Rayiner.

That word is used commonly in the US in political discussions. It is probably more correct than integrate.

> There are some serious failures of the UK method - faith schools are a scary abomination; Beth Din and Sharia courts have led to child abusers and wife beaters not being reported to police, but just moving to a different part of the country (to continue abusing), women are unable to obtain a religious divorce, etc.

Wait, why is the grandparent post considered racist and yours is not ?

Wife beating ("preferably" using nothing more than locking them up and a twig) and doing anything you want to (your own, or bought) children, is perfectly legal in islam (/sharia, which is the same thing). So you claiming that those things are bad, is no different from saying islam is bad, which is far more racist than what the grandparent post was saying. He merely claimed that large amounts of muslim-only areas are causing problems, whereas you're the way of life that makes someone a muslim is immoral.

Believe it or not, different religions don't just differ in dress and the form of the cross in the front of the building, they have different values. Islam was created by a military conqueror, it's values center around that. The basic promise of islam is not that allah will give muslims a good or healthy or happy life like Christianity promises, it's that allah will make them victorious over others. The return effort that is demanded from muslims is that they should make allah victorious. And yes, that last statement is followed by, if possible without fighting if needed by any means necessary.

As if that wasn't enough to make your post racist, you put another whopper in there : "And I'd prefer schools to conform to a national curriculum". You want to take the right of people to educate their children as they see fit away ... How is forced education into a state-sanctioned ideology any different than what's called indoctrination in China ?

Your post is not just far more racist than the posts you're complaining about, it's also far more worrying. If the state thought like you did, we might as well ask Saudi Arabians to take over our government.

There are those who reject persons of other races(1) among both the native-born and non-native-born but ignoring them, multiculturalism works very well.

(1) Racist is a good shorthand term for these people, idiot is another.

How are race and culture the same thing? Multiracial groups where everyone has near similar beliefs probably work "better" than groups where everyone belongs to the same race and have radically different beliefs.

Hasn't it been tested in Canada, too?

It's wise that you wrote "a basic income _voucher_" and not just "basic income". There could be not enough tax money for that.

A great influx of immigrants lured by the "basic income for everyone" concept will most probably greatly lower economic efficiency. This is not because the immigrants would be lazy; this is because they would mostly lack appropriate education, work qualifications, knowledge of the language, and the general culture fit. They'd have hard time becoming as productive as an average American even if they all wanted to.

Of course, the government would be able to print enough money to keep the nominal basic income sum the same — but not the standard of living.

Switzerland, a country with great and deep-ingrained work ethics, could consider such an experiment for _its citizens_. Doing this for any strangers that care to show up is another thing entirely.

It's funny you should mention that last part, because that's exactly the situation in Denmark. We have in my opinion a waaay too high basic income, and there is a growing problem, with people who'd rather live on governement payouts, than get a job. And the nationalists are getting anxious about immigration, so there is a populist party that is against immigration, that is getting bigger and bigger support. It is overall a shitty situation.

The problem is not that people would rather live on government payouts, none of the unemployed people I know here want to be unemployed. The problem is that there are not jobs for their skillsets. The solution to this is retraining rather than cutting benefits. There are also people with mental health issues, substance abuse issues etc, but that is another issue. In terms of immigration, I think the bigger problem is the Danish labour movement's structural inability to organise migrant workers. This prevents these workers from raising their wages through collective bargaining, thus preserving their comparative advantage over Danish workers. Compare this to the situation in Norway where the construction workers have successfully organised migrant workers, leading to no comparable fall in income for Norwegian workers.

Google "lazy robert", and you'll find lots of articles on a case that highlights the problem in Denmark. It is pretty straight forward problem; there isn't an incentive to pick the low (but mind you still sufficient) paying jobs. When the only job you can get is at a McDonald's, and you get more from not working at all, there is a serious problem.

For anyone in the US; In Denmark, there is practically no jobs that pay so little, as to be insufficient for keeping a humane standard. And anyone who argues otherwise, simply doesn't know how it is outside Denmark.

Actually, you're wrong. According to this article (http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_minimum_wage_and_the_danis....) "The average full-time equivalent McDonald’s employee in Denmark makes about $45,000 a year in total compensation."

If you are on bistand (Danish unemployment benefit) you get about $22,894 per year (https://www.borger.dk/Sider/Kontanthjaelp.aspx). Obviously the figure is higher if you are on dagpenge (unemployment insurance), but this is not directly comparable to the dole since it is partly financed by workers through AKasse membership.

As regards Doven Robert, I'm well aware of his case, but one lazy punk with a talent for self-promotion is not representative of unemployed people in general. This is the intellectual habit that leads people to say, "but it was cold today, therefore there is no such thing as global warming!".

You don't have to earn the same thing for it not to be incentive enough, you have to take into consideration that living on government money means you then have week of for being lazy.

Do you have any evidence for what you're saying or is it just ideology speaking? Being on bistand does not mean having the week off. It means regular meetings in the job centre, a fixed quota of job applications to submit and often forced activation involving CV writing courses and other drudgery. It is not fun. I really don't know what you have against unemployed people, but try and remember that you could be in their situation if you are unlucky in the job market when you graduate. Best of luck with your career.

As a member of the EU, how do you keep people from other EU countries from just moving to Denmark and claiming benefits?

Simply crossing borders doesn't give you citizenship.

Ok Denmark, but overall the issue is valid. For example Finland has residency-based welfare aka no citizenship needed. Just read a headline last week claiming that Finland pays more welfare to Estonians than Estonia itself. Meaning Estonian citizens who live in Finland. Most came here to work but are now unemployed. You can't come here for welfare, but if you lose your livelihood soon after you are safe.

A citizen of the EU can get a registration certificate if (s)he [1]:

> is in paid employment

> is self-employed

> provides services in Denmark

> is a retired worker, retired self-employed person or retired service provider

> has been seconded

> is a student at an educational institution accredited or financed by public authorities, and s/he is able to support him/herself during the period of residence in Denmark or

> disposes of such sufficient income or means so that s/he is presumed not to become a burden on the public authorities

There is also a family reunification clause, which I've been told is very rarely granted. As for the registration certificate, it gives you a social security number, without which you are a non-person in Denmark.

In general, the previous Conservative, extreme right-wing supported government toughened the laws on immigration.

1: http://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-us/coming_to_dk/eu_and_nordic_ci...

Denmark does not have a basic income.

Indeed that is correct, my comment wasn't fully inline with the thread topic, but since government aid, basic income, and national immigration politics are very much intertwined, I thought my comment would have value to the discussion.

If you want your comment to add value to the discussion you should edit your comment that says that Denmark has basic income, since apparently it does not.

Apparently it isn't possible to edit my comment, there's only edit link for my previous comment.

It's true that Denmark doesn't have minimal basic income by law, but since most jobs are unionized, the unions have set a basic income. See this translated version of minimum wage on the danish wikipedia [1].

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

That isn't experimental evidence to the contrary at all, because the unpleasant jobs are done by people who don't have access to the government-mandated minimum income!

It's evidence in the sense that proponents of basic income always describe shiny future where all the low-skilled work done by robots forgetting that other countries with no such basic income still exist.

see the recent news articles about the "guest" workers in Quatar from Nepal some truly shocking abuses.

> In those cases, all the "dirty" labor is done by legal/illegal immigrants that are not eligible for said basic income and thus willing to work for much less.

So the introduction of a basic income would make demand for illegal immigrant labor increase. By standard economics, this means that the price of illegal immigrant labor would increase, so even the illegal immigrants would benefit. Sounds like a win/win to me.

> With a decent basic income scheme, i.e. the basic needs of the people taken care of, the job market would probably flip: You would have to pay people very well for doing unpleasant work, and not so well for fulfilling jobs.

This is an interesting premise.

It would probably cause a lot of firms to be started, that compete to do those 'shitty jobs' - that could potentially drive the cost down and be done much better.

This experiment would be VERY interesting indeed.

Very interesting to watch from another country. That is the real reason politics moves so slowly, because the usual results of political experimentation is mass starvation.

Political experimentation usually leading to starvation... Have you got a high number of examples to back that up? I can only think of a handful.

Never let facts get in the way of hyperbole.

Sure, Cambodia is one, North Korea, China in the 50s, Zimbabwe... Millions dead.

Universal healthcare, social security and pensions in Germany (late 19th century): millions saved.

And it's that big a political experiment that the most powerful country in the world still doesn't dare to replicate it in its entirety.

USSR. Millions lost.

USA's New Deal: potentially millions saved from starvation.

That's the problem with those comparisons: it's easy to point at the precise body count of radical experiments that went the wrong way, but quite hard to enumerate the lives saved due to those that worked out. Kind of survivorship bias in reverse.

I'd guess the establishment and enforcement of sanitary standards (which, at the beginning, was considered quite radical) saved more people than all dictators of the world together managed to kill. But that's as hand-wavy as anything else in this subthread.

You can't know how it's going to play out or it's not an experiment...

In what way were Pol Pot era Cambodia and Mugabe era Zimbabwe political experiments? They were/are dictators! There's nothing remotely radical about dictatorships.

Dictators are almost always radical.

As a rule they tear down, or kill all of the people who oppose them. Which leads to a radical shifting of institutions in a country, to such a degree that post dictator, the places almost never revert to a state that resembles what they were like pre-dictator.

Dictators consistently alter the course of history for the places they rule.

---

I understand that you are saying that as we know the results, these things are not radical. I disagree, known results can be very radical.

Sure they were. Google "year zero". And Mugabe's experiment is seeing if "war veterans" make good farmers. Before he came to power Zimbabwe was called The Breadbasket Of Africa...

It could also act as a strong incentive for developing automatic and robotic solutions to these needs.

Either that or the development of robotic solutions to these needs will act as a strong incentive for the enactment of this type of program.

Which begs the question: in a highly automated country, should receiving an income for free, or almost free, be considered the norm?

I'd imagine that in the absence of communal action, the tendency would be for wealth to accumulate to the minority that own the automatons. Either the ownership of the automatons would have to be distributed or people would need to receive a "free" income. The latter seems like a gilded cage?

Free basic income would be inevitable in a highly automated country. The owners of the robots would essentially corner the market on labor. The entire premise of our current social system would be thrown into chaos. Large swaths of the population are not going to starve quietly. We only need to look at history here: once income inequality becomes severe enough and it can't be hidden anymore, redistribution happens. It'll either be by decree or through violence, but it is inevitable.

I wish we could be better at separating the notions of "income inequality" and "not enough income." The first is necessary for a functioning economy and the second is... bad.

Oil-rich countries that do provide an equivalent of basic income for its citizens (Saudi Arabia, UAE) do not seem to have a thriving robotics startup community, but do have a wave of temporary foreign workers living in nasty conditions

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm

> the job market would probably flip: You would have to pay people very well for doing unpleasant work, and not so well for fulfilling jobs.

Isn't that already the case? Boring jobs = accountant, lawyer, engineer (to most people), fun jobs = musician, actor, artist (again, to most people, or at least teenagers). I shudder to think what the median income is for those fun jobs.

The fun of law, engineering, and arts is a matter of taste. I am not sure if that applies to flipping burgers and delivering pizza. I know a lot of people developing software for free just for the fun of it. I doubt there would be that many people flipping burgers for free (or a very low salary) if there would be an unconditional basic income.

Developing software is fun. Developing the software that they want you to develop usually isn't. You don't get paid to develop software; you get paid to develop the software that they want you do develop.

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