_My_ feeling is that people would always like a little bit more money. Basic income removes the "cliff" effect, whereby earning more money can actually reduce your income. Therefore people will work more.
After all, if you could go out and work for five hours next week, and be guaranteed that those five hours would give you the cash to buy something you have your eye on, then why wouldn't you?
A basic job tends to discourage mobility in all the ways a normal job does. A basic income encourages mobility because you have time to do anything... including invent something or go back to school (or use online courses) to learn a totally new field. Or even just take a break to recharge.
I'd love to model this, but I have no clue how. Perhaps a normal distribution of a change in a person's ability to produce value when taking basic income and not working. Some people will drastically decrease their ability to produce value, some people will drastically increase it. Most, I suspect, will somewhat increase it and then get back to work.
The article didn't "ignore this completely". It set up a framework within which you can easily express that argument. Go do it.
There's absolutely no data to support any numbers for this, how could I possibly guess?
That's why I don't like this post. It would have been really interesting if there had been any basis at all for the numbers, but a model for something this complicated backed by nothing is worse than useless - it's misleading.
Stucchio didn't propose a magic python script that answers the question of whether we should a basic income or basic job. He simply proposed a tool for making the debate more concrete. The debate still happens. It just gets less stupid.
No. it makes the debate less concrete.
The model is absolutely 100% meaningless. An equally valid model would be:
I assume that basic job has a cost of $1 trillion (+/- $500 million) and basic income has a cost of $3.25-3.5 trillion
How does that improve any debate?
This whole thread is really annoying me because it's just hiding bullshit behind "maths". There are no insights, no conclusions, nothing. Just some numbers. Most annoying of all is the stupid "write some fucking code!" counter-argument. No. I wont write code with bullshit numbers to try and convince people of something that has no data to support it
People are going to go away from reading this article actually convinced that basic job is better than basic income based on what is essentially this guys uninformed opinion. That is bad
Here is the code. You are interested in line 17.
from scipy.stats import *
Try installing a scientific python distribution like Enthought Canopy or Anaconda. On Unix systems it's possible to build it yourself, but on Windows unless you have the right compiler licenses and enjoy pain, you probably don't want to do that.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/meet-the-man-who-has-10...
I think that this demonstrates to a large degree the author's point that the best way to disagree is to make a change and see what you come up with. For someone with inclinations similar to yours, your comment is likely enough for them to justify dismissing the result reached by the basic model, but when you add the proposed effect to the model, well, you come to the same basic conclusion, that Basic Income is significantly more expensive than Basic Job.
A lot of comments here, including yours, come from an unjustified implicit rejection of the main thesis of the article by preferring rhetoric over model refinement. That is, the author is arguing that a better way to go about this discourse is to test the effects of different assumptions with the model, but many commenters are hammering through rhetorical rebuttals to the model's conclusion without addressing whether they actually believe that rhetoric is more effective than the mode of discourse proposed by the author.
Your rhetorical argument (including the argument of the grandparent since you apparently concurred: "absolutely") suggests that the main factor in deciding between the two approaches is whether they decrease or increase work productivity. When that hypothesis is tested in the model, it turns out that the other factors combined overwhelm the effect on worker productivity, and so the effect on worker productivity should not dominate the debate as suggested by the grandparent.
This was an easily testable hypothesis given the model offered, and once it was tested it looked weaker than suggested by the grandparent. I think that this demonstrates that there is some truth to the author's claim that running our assumptions through the model, and refining it overtime is likely more valuable than making these untested rhetorical arguments.
Now, certainly there are likely problems elsewhere in the model, and reasonable people can have disagreements on what assumptions are reasonable. But the point is to argue and test those assumptions continually, rather than offering unweighted rhetorical arguments and either never reaching consensus, or just landing on the argument that is most repeated or shouted the most loudly.
If you _give_ everyone a job, then what are they doing? How does that compete with people already in minimum wage jobs? Are we offering, effectively, subsidised labour for large corporations? How does that effect people already in those jobs, or people who would be moving into those jobs?
I don't believe that any model could be made which would take all of the factors into consideration - I believe that we will need to _do_ it (in one city, or one state, or one nation) and then see what the results are.
You seem to be led by your conclusion that the issue is intractable and letting small complications (or misunderstanding of the proposal) defeat serious reflection on the issue at hand. Another benefit of the approach suggested by the author is to allow a framework for thinking through the problem. Policy has to happen, it's better to have a framework for thinking through the implications of policy changes than to throw your hands up in frustration because rhetoric is a wholly useless tool for making policy decisions.
But there have already been experiments, like this one: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100
"Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.
The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did."
The question is - once you start accumulating, how much will people prioritise "getting more stuff" over "playing computer games all day"?
I mean, I earn about $60k. I'm not about to drop down to a $10k income, even if I could get that without any effort. And I think most people are like that - a big reason, as far as I can tell, that many people who could work, don't is that they would lose money by doing so, at least to start with, and they're terrified to take that risk.
Let's say you're unemployed now - someone asks you to help them wash windows for a few hours next week. Doing so would jeopardise your benefits, and possibly leave you homeless if you were found out. If you could take that bit of work, you'd probably find the number of hours going up (if you were any good at it) and possibly leading into more, better, work.
But if we stop people even taking that first step, we effectively shut them out of the job market.
(I'm sure there would be _some_ people that decided to play games all day. But I'm fairly sure the free riders would be a tiny part of the population. People like stuff too much for that.)
I don't.
And that's the problem with the whole discussion: a simple, critical tipping point makes or breaks the whole proposition, and nobody can sufficiently prove which way it will tip to the satisfaction & persuasion of the sociopolitical opposition. Doesn't help that the proposition, hinging on this vapid presumption (either way), involves ENORMOUS amounts of money: "oops, we were wrong, too many people became free riders" would prove disastrous. Humans have tried a lot of socioeconomic structures, and a "play if you want to" BI model hasn't taken hold.
"Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.
The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did."
Which isn't at all conclusive. One town, in one culture, does not mean very much in the long term. But it's enough for me to think that more experimentation is worthwhile.