Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

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> Enact a 20-hour work week

"Enact" implies the government restricting everyone to working 20 hours per week. That's a violation of our freedom to work as many hours as we want.

I do support you in that all of people shouldn't have to work in order to meet the basic needs of life today (food, housing, and connectivity). Agricultural and industrial efficiency and automization has advanced to a point where we can provide these basic needs to 90% of the populace with only 10% of people maintaining/operating these machines.

A lot of people will continue to work 50 or 60 hours, because a lot of humans are naturally inclined to work. They derive pleasure and satisfaction from it. I would myself personally continue working, perhaps even harder than I do now, but would direct my efforts towards things that I enjoy more, and that are potentially more impactful, meaningful, and beneficial to society. Ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met would give people great personal freedom to pursue what they want.

How would we implement this? One possible way is basic income -- although it might be beneficial to incentivize productive and meaningful use of freedom that basic income gives people. We don't want a country where 50% of the population spends time watching soap operas, and eating junk food.

Just some of my thoughts...

Maybe, in the same way that industrial safety regulations violate our freedom to work in whatever environment we want.

Working without safety regulation is harmful. Working 21 hours is not.

Depends on what union you work for ...

But heck, even pilots can work a 40 hour week (of actual flight time). I am not sure if there is even a hypothetical union that would limit work time to such a degree (<30 hours).

My straw man is burning.

Industrial safety regulations impose restrictions on how you may treat others, not on how you may treat yourself.

Those regulations coerce employers into treating their employees well (which is not bad[1]). If you were to privately, in a manner that did not put others at risk, conduct an experiment in your backyard that violated those very safety regulations, I doubt you would get in trouble for it.

[1] It's not as bad a thing for government to regulate how individuals treat each other, as it would be if it regulated (passed laws around) how an individual treated himself/herself.

I just can't get behind basic income. It makes sense from a very self-motivated individual's point of view (which many/most on HN are) but if you look at the majority of the country in my opinion most people are not driven this way.

I really feel like we would end up with a country where the majority just live on basic income and do nothing. At least now they must contribute to society on a basic level to earn an income, even if it is unsatisfactory (welfare and social programs aside).

This is something I cannot figure out, people do not get bored after a while of doing nothing ?

There is a large difference between doing nothing, and doing nothing of value to society.

For example, I love to learn. I could spend ages reading books and learning as much as possible for my meager brain to understand about physics and it would be very fulfilling.

But unless I apply that knowledge, it really wasn't of much value to anyone (even myself, depending on how you look at it).

So why do I deserve to take advantage of all society would provide with basic income (food, shelter, safety, etc..) if I provided nothing in return?

Ok, I see, but after you spend 5 years of your life learning you will be able to do a lot of thing.

Now, why should you start doing something different from learning ?

Maybe because if you do something productive you will product value that will let you to live in a better house, or to learn more...

The point is not to let everybody doing nothing of productive, the point is to give to everybody the choice, between doing nothing of productive now vs. bringing values to the society...

I have been surprised over and over again at the powerful force that is doing "just enough" to get by. So many people are affected by it. It's really quite impressive.

You know those bars you go to? Restaurants? Theatres? The list goes on. No one would work at those shitty jobs any more. Because 25k is comfortable - why would I work at a shitty job for another few thousand?

You definitely get a point.

However, in my opinion, the point is that nobody should work at such "shitty jobs", who enjoy being a waiter, will be one in some high end restaurant where he will compensate in an extremely honest way.

The introduction of basic income will need a complete mental switch.

We can dream about robot that serve us, or we can start to realize that the quicker way would be to change mentality and stop to need somebody (or something) that serve us.

I think the challenge is we are currently in the middle of a transitionary period towards full automation of "shitty jobs." Basic income is a logical model once those shitty jobs have been commoditized: there is no need for the jobs, and the people who normally would only be qualified for those jobs need to survive somehow.

But we're not there yet, our economy is still reliant upon a large number of people doing "shitty jobs" in order to grow in general, and more specifically to continue this push towards further automation. This is the challenge: you need a way to alleviate human suffering during the transition towards a greater world for everyone, but the most obvious way to do that (basic income) may halt the transition itself. What we probably need is something that looks more like a bridge than a final destination, but any such bridge starts to resemble the experiments in communism that cost the world so much during the 20th century.

> I really feel like we would end up with a country where the majority just live on basic income and do nothing.

The people who end up on "basic income" would do something they like to do; but that something is nothing of value to the economic elite of the world. In that sense, they do "nothing".

but that something is nothing of value to the economic elite of the world

It has absolutely nothing to do with any "elite". It has to do with being economically visible.

If the government pays 300M citizens each $25k annually, that's $7.5T that has to come from somewhere.

If you play videogames all day, or turn your back yard into a decorative garden, or anything else you don't get paid for, then you are not contributing to that $7.5T.

Which can kinda be a problem if too many people do that and there's nowhere for it to come from.

From [1], we already allocate roughly $6k per person per year in the US, enough to fork over $25k/year to the poorest 20%. (This doesn't account for the potential savings of reduced crime (prisons are expensive!), improved health/nutrition, reduced administrative overhead of replacing all welfare systems with a single basic income, etc.)

Also: not all value is neatly captured on a W-2 form. If turning my backyard into a decorative garden allows me to set a higher sale price for my home later, I've contributed. If I buy groceries so that I can play videogames all day without falling over from hunger, I've contributed. (If I can pay in cash instead of food stamps because I collect a basic income, even better: there's less bureaucracy on the way to collecting tax on my purchases from the grocery store.)

[2] notwithstanding, people who contribute literally nothing to the economy are extremely rare.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...

[2]: http://www.becomingminimalist.com/the-man-who-quit-money-an-...

If you hand out money to everyone, wouldn't prices just go up?

Only if you printed money to hand it out. If redistributive, no.

> Which can kinda be a problem if too many people do that and there's nowhere for it to come from.

This is how the majority understand the macro economics: an extension of bartering system. But a sovereign currency regime does not need to worry about it. What constrains an economy are real resources, but not financial resources. Sovereign debt = public assets. For more, check "Modern Monetary Theory".

That is, printing more money is the way? Quantitative easing, as they now call it.

I also heard throwing money from helicopters is beneficial, too.

Well, thats what mainstream (neo Keynsians) have advised and has not worked. Quantitaive easing just shuffles financial assets.

What is needed, is a fiscal policy--and this leads to basic income, basic employment. The only constraints are "real" resources.

The funny thing is that I mentioned throwing money off helicopters ironically, but probably it was lost for the downvoters.

I suspect this was Poe's law in action; some of the current fiscal policies are so contrived that it's hard to tell theonion-style sarcasm from the real thing.

That 7.5T in payouts doesn't just disappear from the economy. Most people will put almost all of that payment right back into the economic equation through consumerism. In most models the basic income would be pretty close to the cost of living, and (this is strongly speculative) savings would drop to near-zero if people are less concerned about where their next paycheck is coming from.

A huge proportion of the welfare will is spent right away on consumption of necessities (food, rent) which goes right back into the economy. Specifically, it becomes revenue for business owners.

I think the problem is that what we have now is much worse. Today we pay people to not work, as in quite literally by earning less you can take home more. Plus, if you don't work, then you can do all sorts of other productive (cost reducing) things with your time, and you also don't carry all the associated non-deductible costs of working.

The slope of progressive taxes and regressive subsidies is bewilderingly high. Particularly if you have higher health care expenses or anything which might be considered a disability, the first $90k of gross earnings for a family of 4 is almost entirely going to the State & Fed.*

As more people "catch on" to the math we see more people dropping out of the labor pool. The story in the media is it's because people have given up on finding work. But I think a significant portion of it is because it's simply not worth working. Not everyone has figured out yet how much the Fed will pay you to not work, but when you do the math I think every middle-class worker should be very angry about it.

Now I'm not sure we want to have a system where everyone is paid exactly the same amount no matter what, but I'm pretty sure that a system which pays less as you pay more taxes is broken.

* If you take the total market value of all subsidies available to a family of 4 earning nothing, and add in the all-inclusive taxes paid as a result of a family of 4 earning $90k (at about which point subsidies have gone to zero), together those numbers will add to about $90k.

If we get more technical, the numbers are actually shifted up by about $30k, because of the standard exemption and child tax credits, the first $30k of income doesn't count. So really it's $30k - $120k where you're effectively working for the Fed.

I haven't seen a model of basic income where math makes sense.

If the government has a significant source of non-income revenue (Alaska), the payouts seem to be too trivial ($1,884 annually at yesteryear oil prices). Nice, but not a deal breaker.

US on the federal level is so dependent on income tax revenue, that you have to tax income to distribute that income.

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