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There are links to the studies in the right hand side alongside the text. Here you go:

Homeless study: http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/support-rough-sleepers-lo...

Experimental evidence from Uganda: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552

An Experimental Assessment of the Women’s Income Generating Support (WINGS) Program in Uganda: http://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/wings_full...

OECD study "Just Give Money to the Poor - The Development Revolution from the Global South": http://www.oecd.org/dev/pgd/46240619.pdf

It's a bit harder to find as they're not at the bottom of the article where they usually are. But the author of the article did cite several studies. Did you choose to ignore them?

I missed them, thanks.

But the main studies I was interested in are still not there. Specifically, the US and Canada controlled experiments from the 70s (the one it claims reduces labor by "only" 9%).

Given how radically different the first and third world are from each other (one example: in the third world the poor usually work, in the first world they usually don't), I don't see much sense in extrapolating Uganda experiments to the US.

The closest they ever come is citing the same newspaper article about Mincome that everyone else cites: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-experi...

I think you should reconsider the assertion that poor in the US usually don't work. Minimum wage jobs leave you just above the poverty level if you're single, below if you are supporting someone. Considering cash based, under the table, transient work that poor people accept is under reported (for fear of loosing benefits which fall off steeply as a recipient's income increases) I think even finding statistics on this would be difficult.

There are sociopaths on welfare (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013... ) as surely as there are sociopaths in power. But what this article is saying is most people who need assistance are going to do good things with the assistance.

I stand by my claim, about 80% of the US poor choose not to work: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf You may be right that some of the poor are earning additional unreported money, but that also means some of the poor are not really poor.

Insofar as the poor are secretly employed in the grey market, poverty is also secretly not as big a problem as we think. You can't have it both ways.

The article asserts that people will do good things with the basic income, but the one statistic they mention suggests they won't.

[edit: read paragraph 1 to find the stat I cite. I've compared the numbers of poor and non-poor excluding children as well, it doesn't change the comparison much. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441 ]

It is absurd to say that because someone augments their benefits with $300 a month in child care, their problems are over.

Can you point to where in that PDF you got that 80% number? Like, if you're going to cite a link, could you use a number I can ctrl+f? instead of "about 80%"? Because I suspect this number includes children and people who may be better off not working due to medical or other problems.

Why is it absurd that an extra $3600/year might tip someone across the poverty line?

Because $3600 is NOTHING. I need $15k in the bank to feel moderately safe as a bachelor. If I wanted to support a family I'd want a fallback account of $100k+.

Edit: this is a reply to yummy.

$3,600 is a little less than 25% of $15,000, and it's about 3.5% of $100,000.

If a person spent as much as they earned in a year and had no savings, $3,600 a year would accumulate $15,000 in savings after five years. A couple, spending as much as they earned, who wanted to save $100,000 before starting a family, each receiving $3,600 and investing it moderately, would save $100,000 after 10-12 years.

However, poverty is usually defined as an income level and not a level of savings.

So what you are saying is?

You said that $3,600 was nothing. I explained its relation to $15,000 and $100,000, two numbers you apparently thought were significant, and how an extra $3,600 per year can turn into those numbers.

You also quoted savings amounts in response to someone talking about income, so I explained that poverty is usually measured by income.

I am not saying anything beyond explaining those things to you.

I don't think anybody was confused about the numbers and their relations.

That being said, I think in a system where everybody has a basic income, it is probably less important to save money, versus what we do right now where you have to save up for job-hopping.

Where do you live? My parents mortgage for a 3br/1ba is under $300 a month. I know people in my hometown with rent well under that.

Are your safety numbers built on an urban cost of living?

Urban germany, so yes stuff is more expensive here. On the other hand I never see a doctor and live very efficiently. If I had any real expenses things would look differently.

I agree that in theory you don't need that much money. But you have to go the high road when estimating living expenses, people have bad luck, special requirements etc. So in practice everyone should have enough cash to fuck up a few times, even if they don't a lot of people would enjoy living longer simply because of less broke-stress. Some people can handle it, some people can't. I'd even go as far as saying that every person should have the funds to start a business.

In Melbourne, Australia rent and/or mortgage repayments are more than that in a week. Moving out to the country will save a little bit but also limits access to jobs. I don't think you could get a mortgage for a 3br house for $300 a month anywhere these days.

Paragraph 1 states 46.2 million people lived below the official poverty level, and 10.4 million of those were working, so you conclude that the remaining "choose not to work". But the next line states that that first number includes children (at least 14 million http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_912.html) and adults (including those unable to work for legitimate reasons).

Your other link doesn't show its math either. I'm feeling trolled.

You can do the (utterly simple) math to correct the figure I gave for whatever you want. I think your demand for me to compute 10.4/(46.2-14) for you is merely a desperate attempt to maintain your old view in spite of the new facts you learned today.

Call me a troll all you want, but no matter how you demand the data to be sliced and diced, the poor choose to work far less than the non-poor. They work vastly less than the non-poor or the nation as a whole (labor force participation rate, including children, is roughly 65%).

Wow. You present a severely wrong number, with a citation to back it up that actually shows it's wrong, and when someone calls you on it you accuse them of a desperate attempt to deny the facts?

(I will remark that no one demanded that you compute 10.4/(46.2-14) for them. You just made that up.)

The source you cite does not support the claim you make. Indeed, it pretty much refutes it.

1. It says there were 10.4M "working poor" in the US out of a total of 46.2M "poor", and that the latter number includes children.

2. I haven't found explicit absolute numbers for child poverty in the US, but the figure seems to be somewhere around 15M. That would mean about 30M poor people who aren't children, of whom about 10M are "working poor" and therefore about 20M are not working despite being of working age. No matter how you slice it, 2/3 is not "about 80%".

3. But there's more. You said not "don't work" but "choose not to work". Now, indeed the "working poor" as defined in that report include people who were officially classified as looking for work as well as those who were actually working. But, e.g., poor people who are unable to work because of illness or disability will not be included in that number. Would you say that they "choose not to work"?

> one example: in the third world the poor usually work

You'd actually be surprised (speaking from personal experience).

But these experiments don't really prove anything w.r.t. basic income, do they? Of course, if you give a small, isolated group of people more money, their lives will improve. But that doesn't generalize to the entire population, especially since that population has to come up with the money to begin with.

9% drop in work might result in no drop in GDP, increase in work efficiency or even raise in GDP because this 9% goes somewhere, pesonal development, smarter consumption better care for the children or often long overdue maintenance of belongins.

In recent recession US industry shed a lot of workers with no intention of hiring them back and yet production and revenue already exceeded prerecession levels.

Work does not create wealth. Tools create wealth. There's always plenty of hands wanting to grab the tool and brains eager to learn how to swing it and modern tools require less and less of both.

that is a very narrow way to look at it.

the 9% 'drop in work' will be offset by the increase in consumption caused by a large range of people suddenly having more purchasing power,

businesses will have to increase production, and hire more workers to do so.

they will have to pay the workers more to entice them in, and provide better working conditions.

this will generate more work, and higher consumption.

And artists will have more time/freedom to create and thus inspire people, and from that create more happiness for the general population, which cannot directly be measured in terms of money, but is still very valuable.

> businesses will have to increase production, and hire more workers to do so.
they will have to pay the workers more to entice them in, and provide better working conditions.

this will generate more work, and higher consumption.

The problem is, noone has tried to see the complete picture by adding up these effects. The net effect is probably negative, unless this is introduced all over the world simultaneously.

Businesses will hire more people and pay them more => prices will go up, purchasing power for domestic products will go down (i.e. the same income will afford fewer domestic products). Imports will go up because those products will be cheaper than before in comparison. Exports will go down for the same reason.

Therefore, a large part of the expected higher consumption will go to imports / foreign profits. Due to reduced exports, domestic production will go down instead of up. Since jobs cost more now, there will be even fewer of them than expected.

Overall, countries which introduce this, will suffer.

What happens if a basic income were adjusted for those price increases? One would think it would be linked to CPI and living costs.

I'd expect people to buy (more) imported products rather than (the same amount of more expensive) domestic products.

It would probably be worthwhile to give people part money and part vouchers for certain eligible (i.e. domestic but some international treaties might not allow this discrimination of imported goods) products, in order to keep the purchases of domestic goods at a high level.

We'll have less wealth created, but more people will be willing to spend money consuming it. All that means is prices will go up.

Your Keynesian story may eventually play out - the real value of the BI might be inflated away, resulting in people going back to work. Perhaps that will completely mitigate the problem, or perhaps it will merely result in a new equilibrium which only hax 0 < X% < 9% fewer people working. But why create the problem in the first place?

If 100 people produce 10 apples each, you have 1000 apples. If 9 of them quit, you have only 910 apples.

However, with 9 people free to quit making apples, the chances of one of them producing oranges increases.

I don't think we have good information on second and third order effects.

I think a more apt analogy is:

If 100 people produce 10 apples each, and 99 robots take over the job of producing apples, there will be 99 unemployed people with no money to buy your 1000 apples.

... unless the owner of the robots who profits by selling all the apples to wealthy people in other countries is forced to redistribute the wealth in the form of a basic income.

In reality however, OWS and other activists are under surveillance to avoid exactly that outcome.

Because is a developed economy, total production is an increasingly irrelevant measure.

It's pretty important to experiment with these ideas and see what is possible. Look at how far automation has come in fifty years, and think about what we'll see in our lifetimes. Not everyone has the ability to do complex, abstract or creative thinking. Computer vision + cheap robots with good dexterity will render a large portion of the population completely unemployable. Something like basic income might become necessary. There are limits to what a society can survive.

Personally, I think it isn't an impossible problem to find a way to provide a system where people get food and shelter, but are still given incentives to work. Most people do a lot of things for reasons that have nothing to do with food and shelter. With the right cultural values in place, people will still work. (For example, we could implement BI using dogecoin, so people are shamed into going to work.)

The human equivalent of peacock feathers will always inspire at least the young to work. And grandparents like spoiling grandkids rotten, which costs money.

Eventually after carving away vast segments of the population, you're left with unabomber style nuts, hippies, the economically useless, and the disabled, none of whom work anyway. It would be decentralized and self selected rather than centrally controlled and fairly inefficient, so that saves quite a bit of money and human suffering right there.

If there's fewer and fewer jobs every year, and that seems to be the case for quite awhile, then the problem with people not needing to work jobs that don't exist, would be...

> they will have to pay the workers more to entice them in, and provide better working conditions.

Source? Widespread BI is usually proposed alongside abolishment of the minimum wage. This means that you'd expect wages at the low end to start reflecting job comfort more - crappy jobs (trash pickup?) would have to be paid more to entice people, but cushier jobs may well see pay go down.

> the 9% 'drop in work' will be offset by the increase in consumption caused by a large range of people suddenly having more purchasing power

That money didn't come from nowhere. There is an equal decrease in purchasing power for others due to the increased taxes needed to fuel such an expensive scheme.

If we can have an increasing GDP while most of America experiences stagnation (as with the recent recovery) who's to say we can't have decreasing GDP coupled with improving quality of life? (at least for a short period) As you point out, machines are doing far more of the work that workers once did.

Another policy of FDR's New Deal was the creation of the 8 hour day (many people still worked 12-14 hour days until then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_Day#United_States). Perhaps reduced hours allowed more laborers to move into the workforce, and could be a more competitive and cheap way of supporting a broad middle class.

Most of America has not experienced stagnation. They have experienced a consistent increase in employment compensation and a consistent increase in consumption.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=qG0

The only "stagnation" that has occurred has been a shift in compensation from taxable wages to untaxed non-wage benefits.

The fundamental problem is that with a drop in labor we will have fewer goods and services. No matter how you slice it, that's a drop in (real, not necessarily nominal) consumption.

What about this labor drop? http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CIVPART?rid=50&s...

What about it?

* Why do you think GDP is the most significant stat? I suggest that GDP primarily represents the status of the wealthy, and that working people may not be sensitive to GDP. Why is GDP your KPI, rather than, the status of the poorest in society?

* Why do you think a drop in working hours would cause a drop in GDP at all? I would assume the working hours lost would be at least below average productivity, and could be negative productivity, as the false incentive for people to create 'work' for themselves is reduced.

Remember the homeless guy who coded an app? Imagine what a basic income could do to the millions of people whose brainpower is mostly dedicated to surviving day to day, week to week, month to month. (Because indeed, poverty taxes our brain [1])

The article provides really strong examples in why a 9% drop in working hours does not necessarily mean a drop in "created wealth". (In fact, I'd argue that many European social democracies work on average less than US workers, yet still maintain a very high GDP)

[1] http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/ho...

> it would be vastly cheaper to adopt FDR's employer of last resort policy

The employer of last resort policy is perhaps a useful emergency policy for dealing with mass unemployment in an industrial-era economy, but its a rather bad long-term policy because make-work inhibits, rather than enables, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and skill realignment, and it has serious limitations in an increasingly post-industrial economy.

Progressive automation means that era of wage labor is waning -- what we need is a transition to an economy of microcapital, and viewing a substantial share of taxation as being rents on the commons that are redistributed equally to the citizenry is probably the best way to get there. Pointless make-work wage-labor for a growing undercapitalized underclass while the overclass lives on larger and more concentrated capital stocks is not a good alternative.

At least some of those working hours were probably spent doing work that, if supply and demand actually functioned normally in the job market, could not exist because the employers valued it at less than the cost of supplying that work in terms of keeping the workers fed, housed and capable of work.

You can reduce working hours while increasing revenue if workers are using this to train in and land better paying careers that complement their skill sets better.

I certainly don't think a 9% drop in working hours is a 9% drop in GDP.

Doesn't make a single lick of sense to me. The real world simply doesn't work like that at all. Not everyone in a country contributes exactly the same figure to GDP.

Also, a couple of lines down listed a huge number of cost savings and higher earnings and new employment created.

So.... Did you just not read on a paragraph more?

I certainly don't think a 9% drop in working hours is a 9% drop in GDP.

From my post: "Now, a 9% drop in work will result in less than a 9% drop in GDP..."

The next few lines cite no stats. They just quote someone saying the decline was "undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities". As I said, "can someone link to actual studies?"

(Note: I realize studies in Uganda are linked, but I'm talking about the US and Canada studies, which had a 9% and 13% drop in hours worked according to uncited numbers in this article.)