A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory
qz.com
qz.com
If a government were to do that for everyone it seems pretty obvious that society will be better off - people will spend their time working on things to improve everyone's life rather than worrying about how to afford their rent.
Some people will. I have met many plenty of people though that don't care about other people regardless of their income.
Sounds like a good deal for the crap vendors. Also, maybe the instant-gratification app scene...
Apart from that, it is called "basic income", not "luxurious income". Ask these people if they still wouldn't work if the alternative is not being able to afford a smartphone, Game console, plasma TV or car.
I've had dreams of doing this to an In-n-Out location. Every one I've been to has had all the employees doing every job like a scatterbrained beehive, and it takes 15-20 minutes to get your food.
If a government were to do that for everyone it seems
pretty obvious that society will be better off - people
will spend their time working on things to improve
everyone's life rather than worrying about how to afford
their rent
How does one draw a broad conclusion like that?
Plenty of European examples abound where despite generous - some would argue very generous - state dispensed benefits certain sections of the society just do not respond positively in measures of improvement of their own station in life much less "working on things to improve everyone's else (lives)".
A good - and I admit quite controversial - account of this kind of malaise is recounted in the British Channel 4 documentary, Benefits Street [1] [2]
[1] Benefits Street Season 01 Episode 01
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlrLp-R4g_M
[2] Benefits Street
You shouldn't let some opportunistic reality TV show be the basis for your world views.
You shouldn't let some opportunistic reality TV show be
the basis for your world views.
The opinion polls suggested quite the opposite outcome [1] which goes to prove that many of the voters were quite concerned about the issues such as these and general direction in which UK as a sovereign nation was headed, but rather stopped short of voicing them openly, lest they be branded prejudicial or worse.
[1] Election 2015: How the opinion polls got it wrong
For many years people on English out of work benefits were not allowed to do voluntary work or be a student - those were things that would have stopped the benefits.
This carried over to some of the disability benefits. If you did voluntary work to prepare you to get back into full time work your benefits would be stopped.
Citing benefits street, and calling it a documentary, is an odd choice. Do you think that programme has any credibility?
Can you help add more context for what you're getting at?
Today, Channel 4 is still technically a PSB, but it's not and has never been "non-commercial" - it shows adverts and makes profits just like any other commercial channel.
Calling "Benefits Street" a documentary would be like saying that Jersey Shore or The Osbournes was a documentary. It's not.
The OFCOM investigation is, I think, evidence that the programme was low quality, and focused on sensationalism rather than accuracy. (Although they didn't uphold any of the complaints).
Channel Four is publically owned but is not non-commercial -- it has to mostly fund itself; it carries ads and sells its programmes.
I think public welfare systems has a tendency to make "leechers" more visible. They leech on the government rather than family and they probably tend to collect in specific areas, but I'm not convinced it makes the problem worse.
Although I think basic income would work, I agree that he was exaggerating when he wrote that it "seems pretty obvious". There are some evidence that it would be beneficial, and there's also some pretty straight-forward arguments for why it would be good on a national scale (less bureaucracy). But we won't know until we try. I think more experiments are in order (1: removing restrictions and terms of welfare payments to see if that leads to more undesirable behavior. 2: giving basic income to a whole town with correspondingly realistic taxes to see if working people's behavior changes)
Personally I come down on the skeptical side of the fence, but would really love to be proven wrong.
Also Benefit Street is not a documentary interested in facts, but reality TV at its finest, interested in entertaining, and should be judged as such.
Getting a job has similar disadvantages.
Parent post correctly points out that many of those claimants were prohibited - under threat of criminal prosecution - from doing those things while claiming some benefit.
Or another example; until not so long ago, my mother (single parent) got social benefits that would disappear if my own personal income would exceed a particular (not very big) amount, and this would turn into a problem with paying rent and feeding her and my siblings. She also spent some time unemployed after a company she worked in went bust (the original owner died, and his son mismanaged it into the ground), because all jobs available for her wouldn't even pay enough to cover the lost benefits.
Basically, living at the lower end of income spectrum is incredibly hard, and you end up doing a lot of weird calculations. When working hard for 8+ hours a day pays you less than not working at all (and caring about your kids instead), suddenly this "laziness" becomes a perfectly rational choice.
certain sections of the society just do not respond positively in measures of improvement of their own station in life -- I think we cannot escape the fact that this is true. Even in the wealthiest welfare states, there is poverty and unhappiness, but mostly it's not because of lack of (monetary) benefits, or access to education etc.
At least in my country (Finland), the development has been from state assistance (for instance, a tired single parent gets someone to help him/her a couple of times per week and do a bit of looking after the whole situation) to monetary payments (they get 123 € per week, which is taken away if they go to work, and they have freedom to decide what to do). And I must admit that when I was younger, I tended to be very liberal/libertarian (in the American sense) and say just giving people money and freedom is what we should do, but now I think it was a mistake. In the short term, people do hate waking up and going to work every day, even if in the long term they will live better lives if they do so.
The vast majority of people are not. You're vastly over-estimating the general population. The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream. (Step outside the startup bubble for a while). Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit others is a bit far fetched.
Communism (Which is what this is), has failed. Why this generation seems determined to try it again is beyond me.
This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone, regardless of merit. It's a fantastic way to reward failure and penalise success, and society will suffer because of it. The numbers are also staggering - it just doesn't work mathematically unless you can magic up billions from somewhere each year.
Also be under no illusion - if a basic income was implemented, the chances are (Assuming you're better off than the average person) you would have to reduce your quality of life substantially to pay for it.
I've always felt that this argument against basic minimum income said more about the arguer than society at large. In my experience, everyone has a personal project that gets sidelined for their work.
I'd like to believe, possibly naively, that for a lot of people there would be a middle ground. Spending their time on personal growth, creative pursuits, general fitness and well being. In essence, living well.
Just because you're not attempting to start the next social media, it doesn't automatically mean that you have no other interests or internal framework for living.
Welcome to the hyper-individualist bro culture based around status and money. The self-worth crutches for people with low self-esteem/ huge uncontrollable egos.
You can see it when an 'Average Joe' gets a windfall. Anecdotal evidence is all I have, but having observed several people inherit money from older relatives who have passed, the general first focus is on creating free time to spend with family and friends. Then they focus on those organizations they are already involved in. Then they focus on fun nonsense like large TV's and dumb cars.
Why does everything have to be about companies and money? Can't you really imagine any useful social, artistic, or other things these "dumb, lazy" people might want to invest their time into? How about just being a stay at home parent and investing more time in their kids? Do you really think society would not improve from any of these things?
Why would everyone need to work anyway? It's not tenable. A few more years/decades and we'll have automated so much it'll be impossible to actually employ everyone. So unless you suggest we let everyone who is in a now obsolete field starve, I suggest we start thinking of how we're going to manage a society where it's just impossible for everyone to work.
EDIT: Also, where's this 240 billion figure coming from?
Automation will just move a few jobs around, like it always has done. And yes - we don't need jobs. But no - that doesn't mean the state should give everyone free money.
Why not?
Ok, sure.
> We would all have to pay for it.
Well, yes.
> We would be subsidising laziness.
Why is it laziness? As I pointed out, repeatedly, above. There's two ways we can go with this discussion. You can state "There is nothing worth of value, except economic value". If that's what you believe, fine. But I think that is a very shallow and hollow belief and then there is not much sense in further discussion.
Alternatively, you can agree that there are pursuits that, while not producing any economic value, are very valuable to society. Such as arts, social projects, research, etc. and that those of us who are good at maximising economic value (but, most likely not spending as much time/effort in other areas) should subsidise those of us who ARE taking care of our elderly, raising kids, or otherwise fulfilling socially and artistically important roles. In which case we can discuss whether basic income is a good way to accomplish this or whether there are better ways.
And what is so terrible about subsiding laziness? Why do you care? If you have more than enough money to do whatever you want, what does it hurt you that someone manages to "not starve" even though they don't "do anything"? Is that really so bad? You would honestly prefer thousands, if not millions, starving to avoid "subsidising laziness"?
What about all those social projects that people want to do, but don't have time to really support?
That's part of the reason why most scientists before the 1900s were wealthy men from the upper class.
I'm not sure "practising for reality TV shows" falls into the category of self-actualisation I'm particularly keen to uproot the economy as we know it to fund.
For many people that project is to watch their favorite TV shows while eating their favorite ice cream.
Just look at people who inherit or win large sums of money - a few of them end up just enjoying themselves, but most use the money to follow a cause that they think is something worthwhile. There's no reason to believe the same wouldn't be true (on a smaller scale) for a minimum income.
And yes, I am a programmer. You can end up in shit as one too. I made some bad work choices before and ended up pretty much not being paid for half a year.
Basically, the argument is that "poor people do stupid stuff" because their "intelligence bandwidth" is being sucked up by worry about where to find the next meal/rental payment/etc. leaving no brainpower for what we well-off and spoilt folk would call "constructive pursuits".
Can you link to the source you're talking about? I'd like to know more about what you're referring to.
The studies about people that win money that I've seen paint a different picture: 75% lose it all within 5 years by not spending wisely. It's the same with professional sports players and it's gotten so bad, they have started getting them mandatory professional money managers. I believe there is a Netflix documentary about it called "broke".
People that inherit money also end up losing their money at crazy rates unless they already had good money management skills/work for a living/were taught these skills by their parents.
I don't see how this would be any different with a basic income. Not to mention the inflation caused by it. For starters, all businesses will have their prices raised automatically to pay for the new taxes imposed on them.
In the very beginning, it might be okay in terms of economics. However, as the years go on, more and more people will start relying on this basic income and we will have entire generations of people depending on it to live.
Costs will only increase and there will be less people actually contributing to the tax base, so the only way to continue to pay for it is tax increases on the middle class and everyone else making a living. It's basically just another wealth transfer scheme to people that never earned it.
The sad fact is that the vast majority of people never really appreciate things they haven't earned and although a basic income sounds nice in theory, it's a flawed idea that is doomed to fail.
The problem here is the rate of job automation vs. job creation right now. There's a lot of indicators suggesting we're reaching - or have reached - the tipping point here. We need a strategy for giving people breathing space to adapt to job destruction. That might be a basic income, or a government backed re-training program perhaps. But the latter supposes that there are enough jobs to go for when they re-train. And the one big growth area, IT, is really limited to those with some some degree of innate talent. Think about all those truckers and taxi drivers who are going to see their jobs eliminated by maybe 2030.
The idea of a basic income does not imply a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the poor or indeed anyone. You could set up a basic income system tomorrow in your country of choice and set the level of basic income and tax levels so that everyone, at least in the beginning, was receiving the same amount of cash they were before.
One advantage of the idea is that the poor would be more likely to find work because the marginal reward is so much better, leading to more wealth overall and sharing out the tax burden more. At least in theory.
With all due respect, you are only thinking about basic income at step 1. I laid out what will happen at step 10..which is essentially a wealth distribution system.
"You could set up a basic income system tomorrow in your country of choice and set the level of basic income and tax levels so that everyone, at least in the beginning, was receiving the same amount of cash they were before."
Where do you think the money comes from to support a basic income? Who do you think pays for it?
"One advantage of the idea is that the poor would be more likely to find work because the marginal reward is so much better"
How so? Many poor people will be content with not finding work and just living on basic income. Minimum wage will also need to be well above what they are getting from the government, further contributing to inflation.
"leading to more wealth overall and sharing out the tax burden more. At least in theory."
You are only looking at it from one very small part of it.
Living in Norway it is perfectly possible to slack off on the taxpayers' bill if you want to, but society doesn't collapse. People would rather avoid the low status associated with living on the dole than avoid work.
I think in Norway it would end up with much worse results than in the US. I think Norwegians in this case would vote for some kind of nazi stuff. It's enough for you to have a few immigrants here and there to become extreme right.
So, please don't compare and don't think you are any better. You are not.
I really fail to see how this can be anything other than an argument for more fair/equal wealth distribution in the world. If most countries had similar schemes, then why would the "good for nothing immigrants" go to supposedly scrounge in the US?
You do realise that if you redistributed wealth over the world, you would be drastically worse off don't you...
Don't "overunderstimate" the reason of the average reader here and don't be discouraged by the down vote.
"Zwei mal drei macht vier, widewidewitt und drei macht neune, ich mach mir die Welt, widewide wie sie mir gefällt."
I'd be drastically better off.
If you refer to the current government, consider that the junior partner in the current government that is considered "extreme right" by Norwegian standards would mostly be Democrats by US standards. E.g. a substantial proportion of them are in favour of continuing most of a welfare system that would get even many Democrats in hysterics over socialism.
By Norwegian standards, the majority of the US Congress is "extreme right" and threatening "US conditions" is a well established way of scaring people.
communism was doomed from the beginning as they were removing all incentives to do something useful in the long therm.
The second doesn't disincentivize working, as you still get increased rewards if you work or work harder.
* Unless you are in a position of power of course, then you deserve more.
You realize that basic income will just become another campaign promise to secure votes, right? Couple that with "I can barely live on my basic income!" sob stories and we'll quickly find that basic income won't be so "basic" given enough time.
Everyone getting exactly the same regardless of merit has nothing to do with communism. So much so that Marx spent a lot of time criticising this idea and tearing it totally apart whenever someone raised it (Critique of the Gotha Programme has a substantial section on this subject).
Speaking of "removing all incentives to do something useful in the long term", this is what capitalism does today. There aren't many businesses or even people caring about long-term in their lives, because you have to pay your rent next month, you have to be competitive today, you have to reach your company's quarterly goals, etc. Competition makes things inherently short-term. UBI is a way to remove some of the pressure from general population, so you'd have an option to say "fuck it, I'm gonna do something for long-term payoff" and not starve in the process.
How are you going to pay for UBI? With taxes. If you already receive a tax free UBI, this means the percentage of taxes on your extra income will drastically increase (with factors, not percentages). This means that when you work for someone else (sell your time/products), only a tiny percentage will go into your pocket.
If daycare of your child costs $500, and your full-time job gets you $500, how many people in this situation will drop their job and become a stay at home parents?
Basic Income: "An income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement."
I dunno, they sound pretty different to me.
We have this obscure system that has been around for a few thousand years to do this. It's called "taxes".
Communism: From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.
Basic Income: From each according to his willingness to work; to each according to his need, plus a share of society's surplus production proportionate to the market value of his contributions.
In the event where people are as a whole unwilling to contribute an amount greater than necessary to meet everyone's basic needs, Basic Income is very similar to Communism. There is no additional incentive to work harder, because any excess you produce is immediately applied to the shortfall. If you really bust your ass instead of skating by, everyone gets an extra roll of toilet paper this year.
If people are generally willing to contribute more than is strictly necessary to keep everyone else alive and healthy, they are very different. Once everyone reaches that critical tipping point, additional voluntary effort is rewarded by the ability to get things you want in addition to the things you need. And that is probably incentive enough to keep the economy from tipping back into "looks like Communism" mode. If you bust your ass instead of skating by, you, personally, can get your very own expensive thingamabob. And that allows someone else to work a job making those expensive thingamabobs, which in turn allows them to get an uncheap doohickey.
As such, it seems rather important to always calculate the "needs" in such a way that people are always incentivized to work, or to work harder than they otherwise would.
“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin.
Practically, I believe you have an argument (though it may not be correct). But I think it's worth reassessing your moral framework: if there's any correlation between wealth and moral worth I expect that's purely a consequence of an increased ability of those with greater resources to act morally; a lifestyle choice.
A bit of a stretch there and i should know i was born in a communist country. The reason Communism has failed is because of the lack of checks and balances on power compounded with corruption not because of concepts like this.
> This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone, regardless of merit.
Be realistic most rich people are not rich because they are extraordinarily successful it's because they are born rich and there's entire companies with the sole goal of taking advantage of the system (in some cases doing morally wrong things that are technically legal) in order to make rich people get richer. Over the past 5 - 10 years the middle class has been getting poorer while the rich have been getting richer even with the economy collapsing. If you start off rich a lot of doors that are closed for regular people are wide open to you so you don't have to be successful just don't be a fool.
I see basic income as more of a equalizer so people who can't afford billion dollar companies and robotics to replace the workers get to eat as well.
Communism, for all I know, is the alternative to Totalitarism (be it from American corporate overlords or from so called extreme "left") in a future where jobs are no longer to be found lying around. It probably won't be called communism, though. China or Germany (and other smaller european countries) may have a shot, but the US seems destined to be ruled by corporate emperors.
revolution was the least common way to turn communist. Far more common was "forced by nearby communist country"
Also for example Czechoslovakia was advanced capitalist country. It's often overlooked - it was very industrialized country, with long capitalistic traditions, and democracy before WW2. It also went through war relatively unscratched. In 1950 it had GDP per capita roughly equal to Italy and Ireland, 50% higher than Spain.
> Imagine a transition into communism in a less-scarcity scenario
From the POV of medieval people We're already in a less-scarcity scenario. We just don't like to share, as a species. I highly doubt technology will change that.
It seems to me that technology will force that change on us. In a world when a robot can do every job you can, only faster and better, and doesn't eat, sleep or complain, there's little use for you and me. So either we get rid of the whole concept of jobs or starve (or stop the progress, but good luck with that, the very system that threatens to destroy us is the one that's driving progress).
Did it have sufficient over-production that redistribution would remove "common wants" for everyone?
As early as 1845, Marx set that out as a central criteria that would have to be met before a socialist revolution would have any hope of succeeding.
> We just don't like to share, as a species.
And in fact, this is a central aspect of Marx' argument for socialist revolutions: We don't like sharing, and so for the vast majority of workers, the only way of getting a reasonable share is to join up and force the upper classes to surrender their wealth.
Marxism is basically founded on two ideas: 1) Capitalism will eventually make production efficient enough to produce substantial surpluses. 2) Workers will only get "their" share by cooperating to fight the ruling classes, and if they don't they will eventually get marginalised as capitalist competition starts driving down employment and/or incomes.
Nothing assumes people wanting to share. On the contrary, the Marxist focus on revolution is basically based on the idea that there's no chance you'll get wealthy ruling classes to voluntarily give up their wealth.
It assumes once workers won the surpluses won't decrease.
This turned out to be false assumption, because people don't like to share, so they don't work as well if they only get part of the fruits of their work, as they would if they got most of the fruits of their work for themselves.
The important thing is - salaries depend on their performance and on the demand for given product/service.
> communist country. The reason Communism has failed is > because of the lack of checks and balances on power > compounded with corruption not because of concepts like
Socialism did not fail because of corruption - capitalism has this too. Socialism failed because of its inability to put pricing on a product due to lack of a market place. On the other hand, Socialism had tremendous growth. Hitler (another socialist) said, "The Soviet Union is a rotten house - kick in the front door and the whole house will collapse". This was true in the WWI but in WWII the Soviet Union was a different country, they probably had a higher GDP than Germany. Why? Because Stalin achieved growth rates that may have dwarfed China (controversial, but he may have achieved up to 500% Growth in 13 years based on some estimates).
So socialism failed, back to capitalism. Yes, capitalism survived. But how much longer?
"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...
Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...
Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...
Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
That implies that being poor is a product of a personal 'failure'. Sometimes it is. From what I understand though, the vast majority of times it's not. Much like the vast majority of wealthy people aren't wealthy because they really worked at it, but because maybe they worked at it and mostly they were given opportunities that the less fortunate weren't.
No it isn't, communism is a form of government, which in theory everybody is equal.
Basic income is a variant of welfare / taxes.
Basic income will unleash a temporary plague of laziness, as people snatch back control of their own life, raise a middle finger to the world that has hurt them, and seek comfort activities and recuperation. This will continue for a month or two, and then they'll get intolerably antsy for something constructive to do. It's at this point that you'll start to see how much human creativity was stomped upon by "the 9-to-5".
I'd say it's closer to the ideas defended by the Situationists.
Isn't communism about central economic planning? Basic income is explicitly capitalist. No-one decides who ought to do what. We just distribute money, and let the market determine what to fund with it.
Though because you bring up central planning - I think that we should reconsider this idea. In a technological society, central planning run by supercomputers executing global optimization algorithms doesn't sound like that bad of an idea. Historically, central planning failed mostly because there was no way for flesh and blood humans to react fast enough and to optimize well enough (that and usual human corruption). Not to mention we didn't have properly developed optimization theory before the 60s.
The other problem is that if implemented, any future elections would boil down to which party is going to raise basic income the most (Bribing the electorate).
Be under no illusion: the reason why our culture is so fucked up and our common psyche is so damaged is the capitalist system, that robs humankind of its humanity by stripping humankind of its dignity. We are not cheap resources. We have rights.
Every single person I know has a passion they would pursue outside of work. Some of them would be productive for society (startups or SME's) and some would be largely neutral (self-indulging in sports for example) but none would be destructive. Contrasting that to their work lives I have witnessed some of them taking part in activities that are largely destructive to society because it is the only thing that will put food on the table. Surviving at a minimum level of comfort should not be merit based. Living in opulence perhaps but not at bare minimum level.
Finally with your last point if society is stabilized through UBI and we leave behind our guilt based protestant work ethic and crime through desperation ridden society I can't see how I would be worse off. I would be able to pursue any project I deemed worthy (even some that are not profitable but would have a profoundly positive impact on society) and not fear financial ruin. The quality of society would improve and therefore the quality of life for everyone also.
Your post is heavily emotional but full of glaring factual inaccuracies that reflect on you more than they reflect on society itself.
Its not a matter of meritocracy vs basic income. Its the current welfare state vs basic income.
People like you and I are already paying loads of money to the masses in the form of (from an American perspective) Food Stamps, continued Federal make-work programs (like the USPS/military), Social Security, Disability Insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.
Just as a freebie example, The US spends ~$3000 per capita on its military. Cut that in half and give everyone $1500/year no strings attached. That alone would relieve a lot of stress for a large percent of Americans.
Sure one solution is pushing the wages of say a factory worker up so it's enough to sustain them. In reality we'll probably reach a point where lots of manual labor jobs shouldn't rationally be done by humans. It's a very hard problem to solve imo and naive "comperative advantage though" isn't the answer.
I mean I can see a ton of reasons against base incomes but I also don't see many good answers for a scenario where say half the currently working population could be "optimized away".
The vast majority are happiest when they are doing meaningful work, not by sitting on the couch and eating ice cream while being void of engaging work. This is true for people of all walks of life, the super bright, the super disciplined, the super motivated as well as the other end and everything in between. The concept of basic income would free people to pursue engaging work. Meaningful work does not have to come in the form of trying to cure diseases or build sky scrapers, or start a tech company.
Meaningful work is abundant and not limited by the arbitrary limitations created by a material-consumption-based society what was ushered in by the industrial age, which for the the majority has dictated what is economically viable to make a living. Meaningful work can come in the form of volunteering, gardening, looking after elders, helping the environment, creating beautiful neighbourhoods, social support, skilled crafts, the list is endless and not limited to people with above average intelligence or motivation. Right now these types of endeavours are not economically sustaining for people to focus on.
Given that technology will drastically cut down the amount of jobs required it is beyond obvious that the current orthodoxy just isn't applicable in tomorrow's world. It is obvious today and it's only get worse tomorrow. Autonomous cars and trucks alone will kill millions of jobs, how do these people find economically viable jobs? Office jobs will decline at an exponential pace, because there will be no economically viable reason to employ people for work that is done more efficiently by software.
Given that we can actually sustain billions of people's material needs with most of the work being done by our tools, rather than people, it is complete lunacy to handicap the population by limiting it because the majority won't actually be able to find economically viable work according to yesterday's economy. It is also completely arbitrary. The conditions have changed dramatically and the sooner we adjust the system to fit the new conditions, the better.
Income transfers were implemented as tools to block communism by no one else than the benevolent, friend of the people, Iron-Friggin-Chancelor Bismarck, not because of fairness, but of social stability.
Then those people starting companies you mentioned are not interested in creating things; they are interested in making money.
I'm sure you can cite evidence of this claim from basic income pilot programs, then? (there has been a few).
> Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit others is a bit far fetched.
Here we agree, but it's beside the point as there's a very good reason for them to do things to benefit themselves that will have the side effect of benefiting others:
They'll make more money. The point of basic income programs is to create a lower threshold that is predictable, simple to administer and unconditional. It's not to create a ceiling on income.
> Communism (Which is what this is), has failed.
This is quite comical, because it has nothing to do with communism, and indeed the idea predates socialism by about 300 years.
It has over the centuries had supporters spanning large parts of the political spectrum. One of the important aspects of basic income is that it is not particularly ideological in its basic form:
There's no implication that the basic income is meant for widespread redistribution, though some proponents wants it to be high enough for that. Many proponents, in fact, specifically makes the argument that done properly it may potentially reduce government expenditure by eliminating a whole host of benefits programs that are expensive to run and hence cut administrative costs. This is an argument often made by liberalists (as in classical liberals by the European definition) for example.
In fact, if you were to push for a form of basic income that would be high enough to make it something most people would happily live on if they could otherwise work, it would be fundamentally at odds with Marx ideas of communism. In "Critique of The Gotha Programme" he skewered the idea that communism involved equal pay, by pointing out that this would be extremely unfair:
People have different needs. Instead, according to Marx, the goal for a communist society should be from each according to ability, to each according to need - in other words: while a basic income could fit within a communist framework, as the only source of income it would just create different problems: it would overpay people who choose to not contribute even though they are able to, and would underpay people with special needs.
This, incidentally is also the reason pretty much no proponents - regardless where they fall on the political spectrum - advocate a basic income that is particularly high. It's called basic income for a reason.
Most of them are also extremely lucky in that they either don't need things like healthcare, or don't have families.
"This is about stealing money from the successful"
No, it's not. Those people would not have been successful in the first place if not for the advantages and benefits they had growing up in a first world country.
They might find something else to do they might not but that's OK it is an acceptable loss.
On the other end companies which used to take advantage of the job market and the fact that everybody needs a job to survive will have a hard time to find employees since now people can afford to be selective.
When survival is off the table nothing is more important than enjoying your job since you spend a great deal of the day doing it.
Another possibility is part-time work being more sought after since some people may want to work but wouldn't like to spend 8 hours every day doing it.
Overall i believe it will have a positive effect on society if you don't get hung up on the fact that some people will take advantage of it which most politicians tend to do even with the benefit system in the UK.
Just to put it in context, that's twice the entire NHS's budget, or 5 times our defence spending.
This could well be cost neutral for the UK.
Sorry, but the whole idea is laughable. Not to mention the fact that it's another incentive to have more children and bigger families because the state will give you more money.
Should be easy to back that wild claim up with statistics. Can you?
Everywhere I look, I see the opposite. Families with a comfortable amount of disposable income have the 2.4 kids, but those in poverty (and particularly the working poor) have 3, or upwards. Anecdotal, but I'm yet to see evidence to the contrary
If you try and slice it by family you find that the 'traditional' family makes up a fairly small percentage of the population.
Richer men in the same country have more kids.
PS: I think I just misread your comment. By "national scale" I thought you meant in the same country.
I don't know of any study on national level, i.e. of families in a single country. The only thing I know of are anecdotes and stories about very poor families having 5+ children.
EX: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/kids_are_normal....
Higher income > more kids, Higher education > fewer children.
This seems fairly obvious as people are less likely to have children and stay in school. But, as I understand it the effect is larger than that.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/richer-people-w...
http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/10/the-rich-vs-poor-debate-a...
Basically if you have two groups of American born, collage educated men, with of the same age then income positively correlates with number of children. But, if you compare collage dropouts vs. people that have PHD's then the PHD population makes more money and has fewer kids. So, education is a huge confounding factor.
We went from 14 being a reasonable age to start a family to 24 or even 34 being the 'reasonable age' that's a huge impact. But, ‘wealth’ as an independent factor aka adjusted for age, education, country etc becomes a positive factor.
PS: Historically, starvation also limited family size.
I always suspected that the reality was more like "people who are able to afford children and able to make long-term plans tend to have only as many children as they want, when they feel they are ready, but people who aren't able to afford children or who don't make long-term plans will tend to take a more devil-may-care attitude towards procreation."
Since population explosion has felt out of fashion, there's a long time that I didn't see such plot. But what I've seen has a much clearer tendency than most social correlations people use at real decisions. It's about as clear as most correlations of quality of life with GDP.
A talk by Hans Rosling[1] on the subject.
But bear in mind: Statistics could indicate the extent that the incentive is having on the incentivized population group, if at all.
A basic income doesn't remove the potential for poverty.
If the idea is to give everybody money so that you can tax it more, you're engaging in economic waste. Without being able to increase productivity in other areas to cover the lost value, you will, hopefully slowly, but eventually trend towards zero, and a failure of the system overall.
Encouraging economic productivity in an environment in which nobody has to be productive may or may not be possible, I honestly haven't any idea, but its certainty doesn't seem terribly obvious to me.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/15/opinion/la-oe-barash...
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/
Perhaps I misread the data.
If you think my figures are significantly out, I'd appreciate any corrections.
--------------------------------------------------
[There were requests for "back of a napkin" calculations, so I've done some for the UK. To convert to USD, just add 50%, as a rough measure.]
Firstly, I prefer to refer to this as a "Citizen's Dividend" rather than a "Basic Income", as I know for a fact that anyone on a low income would prefer to get a guaranteed £20 a week extra rather than hear a politician say, "We can't afford to pay £75 pounds a week to everyone, so we're doing nothing." Tell me if I'm wrong. But "Basic Income" if the preferred name, so I'll refer to it as that from now on.
The UK government spends £732 billion. If we subtract £222 billion for Social Protection (we're replacing all of it with our BI), we get £510 billion required. If we add up all government income except Income Tax - Business Rates, Excise, etc - we get £481 billion.
That leaves us a shortfall of £29 billion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that reductions in crime, the increase in VAT revenue, better health, etc are going to cover that. Let's call it close enough for government work. At the end of the day, we currently borrow £84 billion anyway, so at worst I've slashed the deficit!
Income Tax brings in £167 billion. UK population I'm going to take at 60 million. So, as a starting point, that gives us a BI of £2,783 annually, or £54 ($80) a week. Well, that's not a bad start! Let's consider what it means for actual people. Thus far:
Who loves me: - Right-wingers. I've eliminated (or vastly reduced) the deficit, effectively increased the income tax allowance by £2,783 and given them this amount in cash, while reducing welfare payments to lazy, single-mother immigrants. I should be head of the Conservative party.
- Most people on Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit). While I've cut the amount they actually get, I've also cut out all the paperwork, visits to the job centre, taking money off them if they happen to earn something that week, etc etc. Money without the hassle.
- Low wage workers. This is a big boost above Working Tax Credit and is hassle free (you don't lose it by earning more). It also allows some degree of security in the event of losing their job.
Who hates me: - Left-wingers. While I've helped some low paid workers, I've also slashed benefits, there's no housing support...in short I've cut welfare while giving more money to wealthy people. I should be head of the Conservative party.
- People who're claiming several benefits. People who're on sickness benefit. Basically, all the folk who've had their income reduced below a living wage.
- Pensioners. The state pension has been cut significantly (and illegally).
Ok, I think I need to balance it a bit more. I'm going to reduce the Income Tax allowance from £10,000 (current) to £6,000. This should balance out at the end. I'm going to assume this increases income tax revenue by 25% (I've no idea if this is remotely close. If anyone can be bothered finding out, please let me know). More controversially, I'm also going to increase income tax by 25%, so the basic rate is now 25% rather than 20%.
That should give me a total revenue increase of 50% from Income Tax which gives me a BI of £4,175 annually or £80 ($120) per week.
There is a problem: we've neglected the people who require more than that either because they're owed it (e.g pensioners) or because they have extra requirements (e.g. orphaned children), so having increased the BI up to £80, I'm now going to cut it again down to £60 a week. This will cover pensioners, people claiming benefits which are currently in excess of £60 and support for vulnerable children (note that children also receive the BI, so 'child benefit' has seen a massive boost from the regular £20 per week maximum).
I'm assuming that 20% of people fall into one of the above categories, so cutting £20 off the BI gives us £160 a week to help these people. This is more than the current basic state pension (£113.10/week) so that's a fairly big increase. I don't want to complicate the calculations any further, so the small number of people who require more than this will have to be paid out of the £50 billion we haven't borrowed.
That's us at £60 per week basic income and up to £160 per week for pensioners and vulnerable people.
And I think I'll leave it there. We might still need to borrow (or cut spending elsewhere) to make up other shortfalls, but as long as these borrowings total less than £50 billion we still come out ahead. It might be more natural to cut the payment to £50 for everyone in order to free up some cash for other payments. In the real world, you wouldn't exclusively reserve Income Tax to one specific spending area anyway, but it makes things simple enough to get a rough measure.
£240 billion / 64.1 million people in the UK = £3,744/year (assuming no government overhead).
Seems low. That works out to be £312/mo/person. That certainly wouldn't seem to replace many costs (especially pensions and the like).
Let's say you wanted it to be £500/mo/person. That'd run you £384.6 billion/year. Add in, say, 5% overhead and you're at £403 billion/year. Where does that money come from? If you stick with the idea that the income is universal, you're dishing out £6,000/person/year, waiting a year, then taking it right back via taxes. Which seems incredibly wasteful, and might drive up that 5% overhead number.
Put another way, if the current welfare spending is £120 billion/year, the recipients are only getting £40-£60 billion/year. So that's all of the Basic Income you need to replace the welfare spending, leaving you with a £60-£80 billion/year surplus.
Obviously, the actual amounts depend on the detailed overhead costs for each agency that would be replaced by a UBI program. But I'd be willing to bet on anywhere from 20% to 60% savings for each agency. UBI can be highly automated; with electronic payments and ties to a tax database, it can be as little as a smallish office of administrators and DevOps, and a server farm.
The simple fact is that many social welfare programs are just expensive, because there are a lot of people being helped and the quantity of money you need to spend to make any difference is just adds up.
When Medicare/Medicaid pays $150 for the same type of crutch that sells in a local pharmacy for $15, that difference does not go into "administrative expenses". I might prefer the expense of a human employee driving to Walgreens, buying a crutch off the shelf, and delivering it by hand to the patient that needs it, rather than paying a hospital that big markup just because that's the most they can charge without the benefits management program automatically denying the expense. Because even if it costs $135 in labor and transportation for a human to do all that, the mere possibility that might happen would discourage the hospital from charging significantly more than the pharmacy across the street for exactly the same item, or from charging different prices to different people based on their insurance plans.
It would even work to just give the patient $150 in cash, and tell them to buy a crutch with it and keep the change. Or carve one out of a tree branch and keep all of it. If they end up not having a crutch, it won't be because they couldn't afford it.
You can't rely on a bureaucracy's reports on itself to reveal the inefficiencies of that bureaucracy. There is just too much political pressure to cook the books.
They have 20 pages of corporate guidelines telling them how they have to lie. Zing!
On the morning following the event, some boffins assemble and work out an emergency plan for re-establishing a workable economy, on the assumption that one existed before everyone forgot what it was.
Now, with no memory of the past, does the UK have the land, labor, and capital to completely provide for the needs of its people? If that costs £X per year, can the people of the UK produce £X of economic output per year, and with the correct proportions of goods and services?
(For your reference, the UK represents approximately 4% of the global economy.)
I reached my own conclusion as a result. It is completely workable mathematically. It just doesn't work within the existing legal tradition. That's the one that respects property and contracts--the one we all like because it's what we rely on to assure ourselves that the car we drove to work will still be there when we knock off for the day, and the house we go back to won't be full of grubby squatters when we get there.
But as much as we like it, those with more wealth, who lack the will or the imagination to spend what they earn--to keep the production-consumption economy circulating efficiently--like it more. It keeps the grubby middle class from building ugly-but-productive anthills and beehives within sight of their beautiful-but-inefficient homes, yachts, and luxury resorts. And that is what stops the socialist schemes to erase poverty--we just don't have the stones to commit armed robbery to do it. The middle class largely pays for itself, and no more, so the only available source for the necessary resources to haul the lower classes out of poverty is the rich, including the synthetic rich people better known as corporations.
So you swallow your lofty free-market, shalt-not-steal ideals, abandon your pipe dreams of one day being in the upper class, and you tax the rich at near-extortionate rates. Naturally, they would want to flee such a tax regime. Let them. Just stop them from taking the productive capital with them as they go.
It might work out like France. It might work out like Venezuela. It might work out like the USSR. But if it doesn't work out, it won't be because it is a mathematical impossibility. It will just be because someone made a wrong assumption in one of the thousands of possible places to make a mistake when trying to re-engineer an entire national economy.
With ubiquitous computing now available to everyone we might be able to fully track that sub set of transactions with 'currency with state and history' as opposed to traditional 'dumb dollars' but I think it would be a hard problem getting it to play nice with the traditional currency economy.
For example, indoor plumbing was considered a grossly extravagant luxury for almost all of human history. Within the last hundred years, the richer societies have made laws (building codes) that have switched it to a "NEED". The same thing happend with indoor heating systems.
As for food, most medieval European peasants considered themselves lucky if they got a bowl of thin gruel every day. Asian peasants thought they were lucky to get a bowl of rice. Many didn't get anything on many days. Now in the US the government is talking about "food deserts" and shifting many previously "luxury" fresh nutritious foods into the "NEED" category.
Yes, we rather do like preventing dysentery, bubonic plague, and flu epidemics. Public health is indeed a necessity rather than a luxury.
The details of a specific proposal are not relevant. No matter what specific items you choose for these categories, eventually people will want things you say are "extravagant luxuries" and call them "needs".
If you want to play that game living past your 30's is a "WANT" rather than a "NEED". You probably won't find many people who think this particular "WANT" isn't a "NEED".
This is not a game, and I'm not arguing the merits of any specific proposals. It's an empirical analysis of what has actually happened in world history.
Things you think are "needs" today were considered extravagant luxuries for almost all of history, and many of the things you personally view as luxuries will be called "needs" by others. Thus, the parent comment's plan to divide the economy into "wants" and "needs" is not tractable, since these categories are both shifting through time and also heavily disputed from one person to the next at any given point in time.
I am not arguing in favor of this arrangement. I'm pointing out that that's simply the way it actually is, regardless of our personal preferences or judgements of the situation.
With these 2 rules we should see a steady increase in QoL for everyone.
The main problem with the whole idea is that it is inevitable that an exchange rate will be set and they will be traded. What does a NEED collector do with the collected NEED currency?
See: https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...
Giving it to the poor, who have a higher marginal utility for their dollars, should cause more inflation than giving it to the rich. Again, from skimming, they seem to mention the idea of it being more useful for the poor, but dance around actually addressing it directly.
You don't see masses of low waged workers in countries with maximum working hours (and thus some leisure time) educating themselves.
I don't think comparing how a 15 year old treated mandatory education and how a 25 might treat the opportunity to educate themselves to better their lives is very fair.
I'd assume the maximum working hours in those countries are above 0. When you have to take an hour long bus each way from an exhausting minimum wage job there's not a lot of time to make significant progress in education.
Individual's fortunes look a whole lot like a random walk. Some people, get over their crack addiction and become writers for the new york times, some people get over their wall street addiction and become crack smokers. It's tough to say where a particular person will be in 20 years. Before you start listing off titans of silicon valley, i'd like to point at all the super rich Vanderbilts running around.
It's up to us as a civilization to decide how low to make the floor. any benefit will have fraud. Straight up anarchy, you keep what you kill sounds rough. If that's your plan, i'm going to get together with my friends and stop you. Nobody works ever, also sounds dumb. I'm going to get together with some other friends and stop that too.
So, we pick a spot somewhere between the two extremes. Historically, value was created by people. More and more, value is created by machines. Cab drivers, sports writers and port masters are all on the way out.
I'm not at all sure how civilization works when only the top 10% or 1% of people are actually capable of being useful to the economy, regardless of level of training.
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2014/02/pisa-its-s...
Looking at populations of people who have gone from being very poor to being very rich overnight does not support that statement. Most of the time the money is more of a curse than anything else. I believe the same goes for people who go from very poor to receiving an annuity from things like legal settlements, but I am only guessing at that.
(I'm not arguing against it, I think it's an experiment worth having)
I think there is are a few hidden premises here that need to be called out: the premise that having more money is better for everybody than having less, the premise that not struggling at all in life -- whether for personal goals or paying the rent -- is better than struggling, the premise that everybody will respond in a positive way to the same external stimulus, and so on.
I find many of these premises dubious, but I cannot deny the fact that I personally feel better the more folks in the world that go to bed without being hungry or sick. The trick is separating my personal desire to feel good from what actually may be happening with various policies I would support. That's why we need more data here. It's very easy to grandstand something like this either way. There's a lot of smoke but very little light.
An argument for implementing BI in the foreseeable future isn't really a "nobody should be forced to work" argument, as desirable as that might ultimately be. An argument for implementing BI in ones own developed country in the near term is a "nobody with the right passport should be forced to look for work" argument. I think social security - essentially insuring people from a risk of unemployment caused at least in part by policies enacted by an elected government - is a good idea, but I categorically don't agree that my fellow Brits should have an automatic right to receive more than the world average purchasing power adjusted income without even thinking about doing anything for it.
Labour isn't labour when it's sitting with its feet up enjoying the privileges of accident of birth, and any benefits from their additional consumption that might trickle down to the developing world poor can easily be cancelled out if unconditional redistribution happens to have side effects on the Western economies in question. Not to mention the likelihood of barriers to entering Western countries getting a lot higher...
They may have done it mainly for the benefit of their own heirs and successors, but now that it's done, it's done. All those improvements multiply, and Brits get more because it takes less individual effort to produce the same amount in the heavily-improved UK than in a country where improvements are more easily destroyed or converted. So anyone willing to obey British law, participate in the British economy (accept and spend pounds), respect British infrastructure, and assimilate into British culture should get more than the rest of the world, because those are the practices that allow Britain to be more productive than the world median.
A hedgerow along a country lane does not grow that way naturally. It takes an effort to force it. But once established, it just needs a regular trim and an occasional re-laying to keep the livestock out of the road. You just don't need to pull a new barbed wire fence in front of a blackthorn hedge, so why would anyone complain that no one is doing it?
The resources of the country are preferentially distributed to its own citizens because one country lacks the sovereign authority to force any other country to change its culture and institutions to be more productive. If those other countries wanted to be as prosperous as Britain, they could fork the British system, or selectively merge changes from it into their own repositories. See also: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
So those people aren't exactly thoughtlessly doing nothing. They are being British, as hard as they possibly can. And that allows the UK to have nice things like the NHS. In contrast, Americans, in being as American as possible, can only manage a hybrid public-private healthcare monstrosity that no one can examine too closely or for too long, because most of our psychiatric hospitals are cleverly disguised as prisons.
In light of that, there's really only one essential element that needs to go along with open borders. Assimilate the immigrants.
That isn't a remotely analogous situation. This is people not being able to afford food, suddenly being able to afford food. Being suddenly very rich brings with it opportunities and responsibilities that simply being fed do not.
That's what the experiment is for.
But let me put this bug in your ear:
Most economic models are based on the premise that people can walk away from a potential transaction with no losses. That when people trade value, each party leaves the table with more value than they brought to it but if they leave they are no worse off. That's a large part of the brilliance of the free market -- value is continually created.
However, this breaks down when one party loses value if they walk away, negative utility, especially if the other party knows it. And it is especially troublesome when that negative utility is expandable e.g. when the alternative is pain or death -- things people will generally pay whatever they can to avoid. That's why strong arming is not considered good economic policy. It can lead to net destruction of value. In some cases this can be ignored because the value created for one party more than makes up for the value destroyed for the other party but, in general, it is more than possible that the net effect is negative.
With the poor they might not be threatened directly but the consequences of not, say, selling their time for less than it is actually worth can be just as bad as if someone was robbing them.
We're not talking about making people rich, we are talking about removing desperation and avoidance of death and pain as a motivating factor.
That's a bad comparison, there have been studies that show a small no-strings-attached monthly allowance made people's lives easier and overall better. They did not spend the money on crap like most lottery winners do.
I assume the reason is that those people realize they're still poor, but got a bit of help. Lottery winners get more money than they can handle, start assuming they're rich and that messes up their spending habits.
Inflation would eat it up.
We are also on a long term trend of prices coming down in any case.
The norm is marginal production costs decreasing with scale. The usual exception to it is when those costs stay constant.
Unitary costs increasing with scale isn't unheard of, but it's also not common in any way.
As discussed above, funding for UBI can be mostly reassigned from existing welfare & pension budgets.
Demand for basic food and shelter is more or less a constant (unless you can argue otherwise), regardless of people's income, so as I see, prices for non-luxurious items could stay about the same under UBI.
It's a simplistic overview and there are tons of important factors e.g. farming subsidies or migrations, but in general UBI makes a lot of sense.
Liberals assume "everyone is motivated, wants to improve their lives and do well in their jobs or in society" given the right system.
Conservatives basically assume the opposite.
I'll let him explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHdhrNhh88&feature=youtu.be...
Like taxes right?
I don't think it's obvious hence the necessity of actually testing it in a real-world setting.
We should have land value tax which will eliminate land hoarding, reduce rents and replace income tax. More incentive to work, less incentive to speculate.
You'll never get this in the UK/US as the last thing the elite want is a level playing field where you get to keep most of what you contribute.
It will eventually devolve into a problem like Greece has now. Too many people receiving money, not enough people paying in.
Besides that, asking any government to take money from the people, run it through the giant bureaucracy machine, and magically produce a net benefit to the people is both logically impossible and naturally never going to happen.
I'm sure it will be attempted in America at some point and the "public servants" are licking their chops.
You need a government that extends to the people who are being governed.
Peg it to a CPI? GDP? Or maybe codify it in a constitutional amendment?
So apparently the federal highway system isn't a net benefit? How about the internet?
Also in more direct terms, the government "magically" made profits by bailing out AIG, GM, and so on -- so we got taxpayer money (or printed money, doesn't matter) being used to create (a) more money than was used, and (b) the net benefit of not having the economy implode together with the more arguable net benefit of (c) GM staying in business.
As an aside: a friend of mine used to work as a transport economist, trying to figure out the net benefit of government projects. (This was in Australia, but Australian politics is every bit as borked and corrupt as American.) Typically the cut-off point for a government road project was a societal benefit / cost ratio of 20/1.
The thing about corporations -- they raid the societal common (the benefits of public education, civil order, roads, etc.) and make profits "themselves".
I don't claim to know what basic income would do, but I worry for the supply side of the equation. I used to work in a factory making windows. It was a terrible, terrible job and nobody would do it given a choice. So if everyone has the choice not to do it, what happens to the supply of goods like that?
While I'd like to believe that the job could be made good enough to be attractive somehow, I can't think of an amount of money that would make me agree to go back. This, of course, makes me wish we could free the people stuck doing that, but I wonder just how many goods there are like that? We're suddenly playing with the 'free rider' problem for our entire society. Sure, we can print enough money for everyone, but what happens when it's nothing but worthless paper because there's nothing to buy?
Also, I'm not so deluded to think that it was the worst job in the world, either. I mean, in that world, who collects trash? There are a lot of necessary jobs that just plain suck and we're simply zeroing any incentive one might have to do those.
In that vein, if we go this route, I'd almost think we would be better off to supply basic goods (food, shelter) than cash. That at produces some semblance of incentive structure for improvement while leaving an out for those who have been made irrelevant by technology.
I say that not to be mean, but because of the times I watched my coworkers get their paycheck, walk or bike[1] straight to the gas station to buy lots of beer (estimated cost ~10% of paycheck), and call in sick the next day.
[1] This was mostly due to being unable to afford a car, though I was aware of a few with DUI convictions. In one case, they were able to bike there because I helped them replace their bike after it was stolen around Christmas time.
It's pretty easy to get injured in spite of safety gear. There are the minor cuts, scrapes and splinters one might experience when dealing with (literal!) tons of broken glass, to say nothing of the times it breaks in your hands. And I was grateful to work on the tempered side. Raw glass breaking when handled is terrifying.
I personally gave first aid to someone whose wrist was slit open by glass. After the ER airlifted to a bigger hospital for reconstructive surgery, he at least retained most of the use of his hand. Note that everyone was issued Kevlar wrist guards (not to mention the jackets, goggles, etc.), so it's not like we were unprepared for such injuries.
Another plant had someone crushed under a forklift just before Christmas when it tipped over when they were emptying a glass hopper. Yet another plant had a sheet of glass break when two people were carrying it. It was raw. It cut open the person's neck and they died. One of the machines used to be called a 'Gas Chamber' (it was used to fill IG units with, e.g. argon). I'll let you guess what sort of incident made them rename that one...
I'm sure there are many more such stories, but I'm including only those I know about directly. There were many other issues as well, I don't have a complete list. I'm deliberately leaving out those issues that could be fixed merely by spending money.
If manufacturers cannot afford that level of compensation, or cannot afford to automate the risky kinds of labor, then they cannot function, and that's a good thing, because if they can only do so now because they are allowed to externalize the costs to society of their health hazards, then they don't provide a net utility to society.
I'd be glad if crappy industrial jobs could be made less so, but if suddenly computers are no longer affordable to anyone due to the inability to find anyone willing to work in the myriad industrial processes that feed the semiconductor industry, I'm not sure that society will actually progress as a result and perhaps there could be less socially disruptive ways that better achieve the goals of basic income.
It's an interesting concept. My immediate reaction is that it creates disincentives to work. In theory it does, but the only data we have is those who are currently on welfare and do not work -- but maybe those people were basically not going to work anyway! We have no competing group of people who are on welfare yet still CHOOSE to work to better their lives, because as soon as someone gets a job, no more benefits! So it's natural that an outsize chunk of people on public assistance don't work -- and the ones who stay on the longest, of course, don't WANT to work. But it undercounts those who go on the system then back out of it as they get work.
Other things that seem "obvious" to result: inflation. If everyone can afford $x for housing, why should housing costs not go up by a similar amount? The same way 2 incomes is now "normal", and the same way giving tax deductions on mortgage interest to make housing "more affordable" means, now that everyone can afford more housing, housing is bid up.
I don't know, but it's a fascinating experiment, anyone who is not paying for it should be in favor of this experiment -- unless you just hate poor people.
What a bizarre statement. It's really easy to read that as two things:
1. You're totally game to experiment, just so long as it's not your money. 2. Anyone who doesn't agree must hate poor people.
I'm pretty certain you didn't really mean either, but the net result of that sentence is awfully unproductive: "anyone who doesn't like this must either have skin in the game or hate poor people!"
I merely was saying I can't see a valid criticism for those of us who aren't paying for it. There may be some valid criticisms of the idea, but I'd rather see how this goes.
I can't think of a single (valid) reason to oppose basic research on solving poverty, when that research has no negative impact on the person who might be opposing it. Can you? The only one I can think of is "I want to ensure poor people are kept poor."
1. It's POSSIBLE to be unhappy about this, IF it is your money being used, and you have certain criticisms.
but
2. If it's not your money, I can't see how anyone could possibly have an issue with the experiment.
Which part do you disagree with? I'm not saying that anyone whose money is involved here HAS to be upset about it. I'm just saying, if they have skin in the game, they at least may have REASON to quibble. And if they don't, I don't see what complaint a person could possibly have with research (that, incidentally, benefits people).
I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I believe it's related to the topic of basic income, and hopefully it's at least slightly interesting! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
(Coincidentally, I only heard about it last weekend, at what you could describe as an "alternative economics" conference.)
I think we do, every state has a Vocational Rehabilitation program that attempt to do just that. In fact, I became disabled at the age of 22, and could have lived the rest of my life with full disability benefits, But instead chose to use one of these programs. I have since payed back in taxes to the state + more that what I most likely used. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AboutFDA/WorkingatFDA/UCM277757...
We came much closer than anyone seems to remember under Nixon in the 70's.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/guaranteed-income%E2%...
In a small sense, the US is already doing it. 60 minutes did a story on an area in Kentucky and West Virginia where they estimated 10-15% of the population, 250 thousand people, are on social security disability. Local lawyers guaranteed, and the Social Security Administration agreed, that they could get anybody classified as "disabled" to get benefits.
Seems to work in late stage free markets dominated by 2-3 large-scale players.
But that happens already in the country where I live. People pay taxes, and via taxes, we are able to provide health care and university education to everyone. I like this system, and I'm one of them who pay taxes. It's good for me if everyone is well educated, and healthy.
Whether or not a basic income would work, depends on the number of citizens. Fairly few, and many efficient machines and robots that can do most of the hard work, then it'll work okay. Too many people, then basic income won't work I think. In the future, thanks to contraceptives, I think there won't be too many people.
Your logic is sound, but you've misunderstood something crucial.
Where does money come from? In short, money is created in one of two ways; by government spending and by bank loans. All money that exists in the rest of the monetary system was originally formed in one of these two ways.
From the viewpoint of the worker, money exists only after something of value is created, after all that's how we get paid, we do the work then the money ends up in our bank account.
But in reality, money exists before we earn it. The money in my bank account and your bank account isn't 'ours' before it's someone else's.
The way that money is spent into an economy has a large role to play in the the quality of life of a society that is based on money as a medium of exchange. Some of the ways the money is created can be destructive to the economy (for example, when mortgage values increase faster than wage values), whereas other ways can boost the activity of an economy (for example, healthcare spending).
The role that the banking industry plays in the creation of money has the potential to undermine the social good that UBI could offer, but I don't want to detract from the main point, and the main point is this; understanding how money is created is very useful in understanding how to get the best out of the systems we build on top of money.
UBI organised by a government can just be a different way to spend new money into the system. Aside from the usual effects of inflation it doesn't have to involve your savings or earnings at all.
It doesn't matter if redistribution is inefficient in terms of dollars if it's efficient in terms of utility.
The idea that a rich person gets less from money than a poor person does is called diminishing marginal utility. An example of this is $3,340 can buy a very rich person a purse, or it can buy a very poor person the life of their daughter.[0]
Now suppose that this government bureaucracy is terrifyingly inefficient and burns one dollar for every dollar that makes it to the malarial foundation. This would mean that a rich person has to give up 2 purses to save one life. In most people's books this is a huge gain in utility, and is why even if redistribution is inefficient[1] financially, it is very efficient when measured by utility.
[0] - Give well estimates that the malarial foundation saves 1 life per $3,433 [1] - The latest papers by the IMF actually argue that redistribution does not reduce growth.
I am seriously impressed: you've hit all the proper buttons to evoke the proper emotions in people reading your comment to take your side. How can anyone argue that a purse provides more value than someone's daughter? they can't, and so you've provided no room for any one to disagree with you.
congratulations! you are fluent in propaganda and argument framing!
how about using a different example, since the money would be taken from everyone, not just the rich:
3,433 is about 6 months rent for me. that does provide me a lot of utility.
or its about 8 months rent for someone else. that also provides them a lot of utility.
so why should I pay for them to be sheltered for 8 months instead of sheltering myself for 6? especially considering that the inefficiency of the government bureaucracy means that they will likely only be sheltered for 6 months: the exact same utility as if I had just kept my money for my own rent.
That may not be a bad thing if we're talking about people who contribute nil to society.
>If the government is giving everyone a check, how hard is it to argue that the check should be more? Not hard.
Not hard to argue, very hard to accomplish. Political change in many countries is slow and welfare recipients are rarely afforded much sympathy by the working and managing classes.
In any case, the real function of basic income is so much more than a moral institution (we've heard those reasons a million times and I won't touch on them here). The exciting thing is that it gets the useless and/or uncommitted to self-select out of the labor market. That means better productivity, higher quality services, a better work environment, lower labor supply and higher wages. They can continue contributing little-to-nothing, be provided a reasonable minimum by local standards, and leave the rest of us to accomplish what we want to in business, research, etc. That would be a HUGE weight off the backs of workers and companies, and I would gladly pay to keep people who can't be bothered out of work. Make no mistake, we're already carrying these people financially and professionally. Not having them gum up our operations would be well worth whatever instinctual annoyance their mooching causes.
That's the conclusion I've arrived at.
you're going to have to explain this logical leap as it is non intuitive and I don't see any sources on your comment.
The above doesn't seem non intuitive to me, beyond the idea that it might actually be worth it to pay some people to go away.
I'm still not following why paying them to do nothing is necessary.
Hardly. If hiring and firing could effectively eliminate poor employees, there wouldn't be so many. As it is, only the most egregious are weeded out. Firing costly employees can be exceptionally difficult depending on local regulations and may not even be worth the trouble considering the risk of simply finding another costly employee. In a world where you more or less must work, low-quality job applicants are especially incentivized to misrepresent themselves. Basic income would divert many of these people out of the workforce and into their homes where they can do less damage.
>I'm still not following why paying them to do nothing is necessary.
They're already being payed to do nothing. They're just doing nothing at work where it costs businesses money, hurts the experience for customers/clients, and worsens the workplace for employees who really care about what they do. And at work they do worse than nothing: not only are they paid to do nothing, but they fill a position that could be filled by a productive employee. So while the business loses money on the employee, the whole machine is simultaneously thrown off balance by a missing cog. Usually fellow coworkers wind up compensating (paying) for this imbalance, with no extra reward. Best case scenario, the business manages to fire the employee. Then the individual either moves on to pilfer another company or goes on welfare. They don't just fall out of the system, they continue racking up costs while contributing nothing. Basic income would allow us to filter them out cheaply (letting low-quality "workers" opt-out instead of making businesses review, employ, and reject them) and fix their monthly cost relative to our economy. Meanwhile, our businesses would become leaner and more effective.
You can't eliminate leeches from society, but you can minimize their economic impact. It is less costly to pay them to stay home than to pay them to come to work where their costs are multiplied.
you also mentioned higher wages for those that are working due to a reduction in available labor supply. wouldn't the higher labor costs for employers off set any productivity gains from getting rid of bad employees?
If those bad employees could self select the "good enough" lifestyle provided by a basic income, we could reduce all the overheads associated with trying to protect workplaces from them.
For example, if you have one group with a basic income and one group without a basic income in the same population, the group without would be more likely to be hired for low wage jobs because that salary is much more important to them. If everyone had a basic income, then all potential hires would be on an equal footing and it would not look like the non-basic income group is more employable.
One way to test the basic income theory is to give everyone a very low basic income and then slowly increase that amount over time. If basic income works, it should be beneficial even at low rates that do not massively disrupt the tax and welfare system. When this is seen to have beneficial effects (or at least not adverse effects), the rates can be increased.
That's not necessarily how it would work. In the UK we've had a top up with tax credits for low paid jobs. What we've seen is an explosion of low paid part time jobs as businesses know people will take them as their income will be topped up by the govt.
So I would not worry about it when the bosses and people in power step in unless they are laying off those already employed to do so. That is the area where abuse would be bad and must be prevented
Personally I think it is lazy to dismiss the thinking behind Basic Income as merely communism.
Edit: A minimum wage is socialist a minimum income is not.
PS: Now you could call it collectivist.
I would not mind seeing an experiment in putting everyone on a BI and then taxing at a flat rate like that. What makes the welfare we know so terrible is that for all its good intentions, it works out to a system that pays people to do those things that keep them poor in the first place.
When viewed in this holistic way, it's not clear which system is better. Some might say that it's not worth "wasting" incentive to work on people who might, for all number of reasons, not be willing or able to work anyway. This is the argument for the welfare state. On the other hand, basic income advocates might argue that poor people are just as willing to work as anyone, and that creating very high effective marginal tax rates for them results in welfare dependence.
Also, I haven't seen any coverage in the mainstream Dutch press... which is somewhat telling.
[1] http://destadutrecht.nl/politiek/utrecht-start-experiment-me...
Here's a quick translation (I tried to do it correctly, but didn't want to spent too much time on it)
Utrecht starts experiment with basic income.
16-06-2015 • 10:15
Everhardt2
After the summer holidays Utrechts starts an experiment around the basic income. Counciller Victor Everhardt from "Work and income" likes to see if a basic income principle works in practice. "It would be more simple if the system is again based on trust."
Why this experiment?
I have been counciller "Work and Income" for a year and I think that it's a sign of civilisation that people who, usually temporary, but sometimes also longer, cannot take care of their income get social security benefits. At the other end of that system we have built up a huge verification system, often based on mistrust.
People with benefits usually have to take into account a large number of rules, like welfare, special welfare, rent assistance, children welfare etcetera. All these systems have their own verification mechanisms. There's a forest for the trees amount of rules and verification methods. It's quite easy to get stuck here. It would be a lot simpler if we could base the system again on trust.
People could abuse this and not go to work?
From our data it appears that less then 1.5 percent abuses the welfare payments system. However, before we get into all kinds of principle debates about should we do this or not, we would like to research how a basic income system works.
What happens if somebody gets a monthly payment without additional rules and verifications? Will such a person go sit at home passively or is that person more motivated to develop him/herself and make a meaningful contribution to our society with paid or voluntary work?
How are you going to research that?
Together with the University of Utrecht we have designed an experiment at which people who live on welfare get to meet specific regimes. For example a group that works with rewards and 'jobs' for a payment, another group with a basic income without any additional rules and of course a control group that lives by the current rules.
And are you allowed to do this from the minister?
We have verified this at official level to see if an experiment with a basic income is possible and we have not yet heard "njet". In addition, minister Plasterk of internal affairs has announced that cities should get more room to experiment with existing law. We think the basic income is very suitable for this.
When does the experiment with basic income start?
End of June we have an expert meeting about basic income with other cities that also have plans into the same direction, like Nijmegen, Wageningen, Tilburg and Groningen. Together we can make our call for more room of possibilities for cities stronger. In addition we like to start with the experiment in the second half of this year.
(deStadUtrecht.nl – Mario Gibbels)
edit: spelling, readability and line spacing
It's odd because they don't really check that you send resumes, nor do they really try to contact companies or just propose you a shitty jobs. The "get a job" mentality is really weird to me, because if you have freedom, and you can't find a job that suits you or that you're just too humiliated to beg all those employers, why punish people for being moochers ?
Unemployment is such a political subject, it always ends up being about social stratification anyways. Employed people are just safe and sound, and there are many parameters and behaviors that keep many individuals away from employment or social integration.
Being a marginal and being unemployed, to me are the same problem.
The UBI solves this problem, since it's injecting money that increase consumption, which in turn also increase business and growth.
People on low wages pay some tax on those wages, then apply to have some of that tax returned. There's a lot of bureaucracy involved. It's not great to be on those benefits because you can't budget your money.
Scrapping that system and then just reducing the amount of tax that everyone on low wages pays would probably be better.
I think there are good arguments for basic income, but they get obscured by the fact that it has become a political campaign, so people like you argue for their own side rather than correcting people who support basic income but for the wrong reason.
You are correct that there are reasons why basic income be more efficient than other redistribution measures. But this doesn't contradict the fact that the money has to come from somewhere, and it isn't relevant to this particular thread of discussion.
At that political level, money becomes an abstract thing, and I think it becomes a matter of national interest, not individual interest. Try to think about absolute wealth, not relative wealth. If the koch brothers can have 100 villas, would they be able to have so many without a redistribution system ? I don't think they would. Look at developing or third world countries, and look at their wealthiest, I'm sure they don't even have proper health care.
Doubtful. Lots of cash is sitting idle.
What you're saying is some other formulation of the trickle down, and it just doesn't work.
Welfare is a form of redistribution. The economy is much better when money is spent for housing people, feeding people, and let them have a decent, small amount of leisure. It's a matter of scale. You better have more people spending money, than fewer people spending it.
You better build 25 town car than 1 ferrari. But I agree that some can praise individual success and consider that people living in poverty is okay, but I don't think it really the country as a whole.
Or they will bargain for a job that is worth their time so they won't accept a job that won't improve their lives. That is a subtle but important difference from just sitting around because they can.
My bet is that when people aren't bargaining for their life -- food, shelter etc because those things are a given they will begin making trades that are a net positive for them rather than just trying to control their losses. 'Head above water' bargaining is a fact of life for the poor that is easy for the middle and upper classes to forget. It leads directly and almost inevitably to exploitation by the other party that is in a better bargaining position.
Further in the article it talks about young men continuing school and mothers staying home and taking care of children. These are decisions that are made by people who are not desperate and not in a terrible bargaining position.
I'm excited to see the results whether they agree with my intuition or not. We need more policy experimentation in the US and I'd love to see some of that experimentation in this direction.
Basic income seems like it will give you that kind of piece of mind as well. You know that in the worst case, you'll have a hassle-free, indefinite, (modest) income to get you by. That's worth something.
I don't think universal healthcare addresses those issues. I'm from Canada and people fight with the gov't all the time over the coverage of medical care and drugs.
Sure, if you have a really common condition you might get everything you need, but if you have a rare condition, you're often stuck trying to fight it out for coverage.
I'm from Canada too, and yeah, the system isn't perfect. Generally conditions which require a more intensive and personalized long-term care (read: expensive) are lacking. Drugs may be expensive. Dental isn't covered. But let me tell you, you need to see your family GP? You'll see them without worry. Your GP refers you to a specialist for tests? No charge. Your specialist orders more tests because of a finding? No charge. Surgery? No charge. You're hospitalized for a few weeks? You'll never get a $70,000 bill.
There is a certain freedom in being able to go through all that, even when unemployed, and never think about whether you'll have to re-mortgage your house.
An income of digital credits only gives you some accounting leverage to access goods in a public market (which may or may not exist).
If there are no doctors, your income won't ensure you receive treatment when you need it.
... Feel free to transfer your abstract concepts to my abstract account.
I'm just skeptical about how we would fund BI to a level that is meaningful while maintaining some modicum of equitability and equanimity. Just to lift everyone to the poverty line in the USA ($11,770) would require paying out more than $3 trillion in net benefits, or roughly the size of the entire federal budget today.
There are 318.9 million people in the US. Divide by persons per household yields 123.6 million households.
Multiply the two: $2.267 trillion.
Of course, if this is how the math ends up going, there would be a huge incentive ($7610) for two persons to remain "individual households".
That said: It's 1.) very hard to see how you make the numbers work and 2.) I imagine that if you told a lot of the BI advocates on this thread "Fine, I'll wave a magic wand and give everyone a BI of $10K," the reaction would be "I can't live on that!" (I also assume that someone in the US today right at the poverty line is probably eligible for certain types of assistance that BI proposals would supposedly eliminate.)
That's not why I find it attractive. Most people would not be satisfied with a basic income. Most people are more ambitious than that. They'll want a condo, a nice car, a nice TV, a nice vacation. That's why they work for more stressful jobs that pay higher than minimum wage work.
I like the piece of mind BI gives you, like universal health-care does, like social security does. I know that if I get a run of bad-luck or I fuck up, there is a safety net.
They are not testing a universal basic income scheme. They are testing an unrestricted basic income scheme, for welfare recipients only. If the experiment is a success it would mean that welfare schemes will become less paternalistic.
So if any of these selected people will try to find a job, they will probably voluntarily "lose" it to somebody to really needs that job. Even without that moral issue, this makes still sense from a business point of view: All else equal, hiring a poor worker is probably perferable to hiring a wealthy one, as the poor worker has more incentives to work really hard.
That somebody would not "really need that job" because they would be guaranteed a basic income no matter what in a real world scenario.
Since the other person, who's not taking part in the study, wont receive a basic income, the person in the study might feel morally required to give up their job potential job to the person who really needs it, which means the results of the study will be inconclusive.
When you go apply for a job, do you find out who else applied, and decide if any of them "need" the job more than you?
So having a small sample set in a big city invalidates part of the experience since the situation is very different from what would really happen if everyone had a guaranteed minimal income.
A koan, of sorts, rough-shod and ill-fitted, yet perfectly shaped for the game.
Or conversely, they might just have more incentive to do what it takes to get paid rather than doing a good job. I think work ethics is a better incentive.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/29/poverty-menta...
[citation needed]
> All else equal, hiring a poor worker is probably perferable to hiring a wealthy one, as the poor worker has more incentives to work really hard.
[citation needed]
Since this is an experiment I doubt anyone reasonable participating in it would leave their work and live only on basic income. So the result is already determined - basic income doesn't change anything.
IMO to test basic income theory, it should be implemented nation-wide for unspecified period of time - with the ability to cancel it at anytime in case of when negative effects significantly outweight positive ones. When it gets cancelled it failed.
Read from the other side, hiring a poor worker is preferable because they'll put up with more abuse, as they don't have much in the way of choice.
I honestly think I'd be doing very similar things. I'd still be programming, and I'd be wanting to make things that'd help people do their jobs better, but I wouldn't feel like I 'had to'.
That alone would improve my sanity immensely (I think), and yet it's only a small conceptual jump between what I'm already doing day-to-day.
That said, without living particularly frugally I'm currently able to save up to a third of my monthly income. This means that without cutting costs I could spend one month jobless for each two months of saving. Truth be told there's still plenty of spending I could cut back on, although that would mean a change in lifestyle.
Time to start saving too?
The bigger question is what about the gas station clerks? Or cleaning people? Or wait staff? Or any of the people working the millions of other jobs that just totally suck. Having done it in the past, I'm 100% sure nobody wakes up totally stoked to go bus tables or wash dishes.
So, maybe people who have awesome jobs will just keep doing what they're doing, but for people with shitty jobs, why not say, "F* it, I can get by with the guaranteed minimum, so why bother?"
Note that €900 (or €1300 for a family) is pretty barebones. You won't be putting much more than bread and potatoes on the table using that. And you'll probably live in a rather small house too.
You can either lowball the minimum income to the point where you can't realistically live on it for long or a lot of services get more expensive + tax hike to support it = lower standard of living for normal people (unaffected by minimum income but not rich enouh to ignore the costs)
You also miss a basic premise of basic income - everyone gets it with no means testing. It is a different concept to current benefit systems. Normal people would receive it as much as unemployed people.
And when we get to "basic shelter" well coupled with free health care I guarantee you there are people out there who have very little ambition beyond that, I know more than a few from highschool that literally said things like "all i need is enough money to play WoW" or just work enough to earn money for weed and go out with their friends and live with their parents (and these are people in late 20s early 30s).
People with ambition aren't the ones that benefit from minimum income (unless they get really unlucky, which I guess is a valid concern, but then again those same people are not the ones doing the bottom tier jobs, at least not for long).
Also that's not how I saw basic income schemes suggested, usually it's paid out to people below min income and then progressively lowered to some point otherwise the taxes would have to be insane to finance it.
This is not basic income.
What you are talking about is called means tested in work benefits in my country. It is bad - for all the reasons you mentioned but it is not basic income.
Criticise basic income if you want (please do so if you are trained economist) but please do understand what it is before doing so otherwise you are merely burning a strawman.
>Negative income taxes can implement a basic income or supplement a guaranteed minimum income system.
IIRC it was proposed as a simplification of the means tested welfare. Basically NIT is the most realistic funding for Basic Income I've seen - but it's irrelevant - the incentives stay the same the only difference is that it screws over regular people a little less (depending on how it's funded, I'm unconvinced by any "tax the rich" scheme).
Anyway I was interested in this stuff in college when I took my intro econ classes I never looked in to it further but I'm 100% sure NIT is a basic income scheme.
Basic income (NB not minimum income!, not negative income tax!) is not means tested at all. No means test period. Everyone gets it. From the beggar to the millionaire. This is a totally different concept to means tested benefits. The proposal is a so called universal benefit.
Grew up with friends who had no food sometimes. My mom would give me food to bring to their house when I went to visit. The mother also had very serious medical problems which was a big reason for that.
There is a difference between not having food sometimes and starving. Minimum income doesn't fix that either - there will be people who will spend their kids food money on other things.
As more of their jobs get automated away, this could be seen as a feature.
Perhaps all the jobs would continue to exist but there'd be some very interesting rebalancing.
in this experiment they can test the latter, since the scale is too small to affect global pricing.
I wonder how far the 'unregulated' goes: could one pocket the monthly allowance and then live on a cheap city abroad while maintaining citizenship and privileges?
at the very least this should promote entrepreneurship: given social security that what I'd do. I can't risk anything now as I have no savings and live in a country that offer zero (monetary) supports to startups via neither private nor public capitals.
I'm curious what makes you think otherwise?
The lower class, of course, largely were servants.
The industrial revolution opened up other avenues for employment.
Edit: see, for example, http://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/the-victorian-mi...
"A middle class woman was entirely dependent on a supply of domestic servants, ranging from the untrained ‘slavey’ to a staff of several highly trained specialists."
Sure. Although technically it's not that the value of the job changes (to the employer, the value of the job is basically the same), it's that wages go up due to the decrease in the labour supply.
I read an article a while back that some types of manual labor are having a really hard time filling positions because nobody wants to do them for what they can afford to pay, and IIRC, they were already paying significantly higher than minimum wage.
That is one key difference between slaves and early farmers.
If you asked a anthropologist, I suspect you would hear a pattern of human beings doing all kind of work in order to increase their status in society and finding a mate. Working in a low status work is not perfect but it is better than nothing and money is quite useful when it can be used on things beyond a 1-room apartment and basic food.
Being a garbageman wouldn't help with this nearly as much as spending 4 hours in the gym and then spending 4 hours building socializing skills. Especially since the other side is now guaranteed being provided for thus reducing the already low impact that being a good provider has on mate finding.
To be more realistic, most of the time I wouldn't even take a job programming if I had food and housing covered. I might do a contracting gig here or there to buy a new bike or skis, or pay for a big trip somewhere, but it's very unlikely I'd work all the time.
I've considered doing something like that now. I have enough savings to pull it off for a few years, so why not take a few years off and play? With a guaranteed minimum income it'd be an even longer time.
I like the idea of providing for everybody, but people need to be realistic about what could actually happen. If it's just a plan to shame and guilt trip everybody into working all the time, I'd prefer we don't do it.
It has so many different sides a test sounds like a good idea.
Taking the shitty out of a Subway (sandwiches) employee's job might now sound hard. But there are so many solutions to this single situation. And these might be fairly different for many shitty jobs. Just to name a few in this case: better pay, automation, better working conditions, smaller one-person franchises, disappear altogether,...
It's nearly impossible to find the solution upfront nor generalize. I personally believe society's creativity can easily solve this.
That'd be a good thing. People leave the bad jobs behind, which would either free up room to automate them without social consequences, or the job would have to be made more attractive in some way (shared between multiple people for less stress, better pay, etc...).
Maybe you don't but there's some people who do. I, personally, actually did enjoy my time working at food service. The first place I worked was poorly run and it sucked but the second place I worked at great management and it was generally a good job minus the pay. I enjoyed my time there.
I also know someone (with a degree) who is a restaurant manager who loves her job as well.
> why not say, "F* it, I can get by with the guaranteed minimum, so why bother?"
Because, most people want to be able to do more. Working at McDonalds might give you enough spending cash to be able to do the stuff you want to do like have a fancy car, jewelry, nights out, vacations, etc.
The answer is that I have actually probably learned more about coding than I had in the 3-4 previous years when I was working a lot, since I had more time to delve in to topics in depth, rather than rush to ship.
It feels great, and I've come out the other side much more productive in the projects I have kept working on.
I've had a lot of people asking me when I'm getting a job again, as I assume they aren't in a financial position to be able to do this so wonder how on earth I could afford it. Although I have been lucky to have some jobs that reimburse me well, I also don't have a car, house, wife (that's happening next month!) or go out drinking. The amount I have in savings is equivalent to what friends who own houses have in equity - which is about enough for me to live off for two years, so I'm definitely not retiring yet.
The plan for the business is to build something (I'm not 100% sure what yet, but I've been following the bootstrapped community for a good few years) that will bring me in a couple of thousand dollars a month with a lot less stress than a full time job, so it's pretty equivalent to a basic income. I will probably end up moving to somewhere where the cost of living is cheaper (bonus: the cheaper parts of Europe also have much better weather than the UK), and then 'work' on whatever interests me - to start with I'll probably take a break from tech and do something more creative and hands on.
I find amusing that you include "wife" with all the other expenses. You'll become DINKYs ("Dual Income, No Kids Yet") and thus you will have even more financial independence :-). By the way, congratulations!
> [..] but I've been following the bootstrapped community for a good few years)
Could you please share the name of the community?
Haha, thanks! She is currently studying, and we will probably have kids in the next coupe of years - when we do she wants to take care of them rather than working, so unfortunately not! At least being Europeans we have good social welfare.
> Could you please share the name of the community?
There isn't a HackerNews-for-bootstrappers, at least I've found nothing worthwhile. There are a lot of disparate communities depending on what area you want to get into (e.g. creating a consulting agency, building a SaaS, internet marketing, brick-and-mortar business, etc). Most of what I follow revolves around Microconf, here are a few notable podcasts:
http://www.bootstrappedwithkids.com/
http://nightsandweekendspodcast.com/
I'm not sure the regular spouse would agree moving in into that 1-room studio/semi-frat-house and eating canned beans 5 times a week ?
I assume the money will not be printed (this would not help, as inflation would make that income very small).
So the country that applies such policy must have some way of finding money. Some countries have natural resources that they can sell, so the problem is solved. But how about the rest?
I guess this will be financed by those, who are earning more money.
Let's forget about the question if this is moral or not to take away money from people who are working hard just to give away these money to those, who are not working at all.
However the taxation will make costs of work higher and higher. Country economy would become less competitive.
In addition avoiding taxes would start to be really profitable - people would start opening fake companies abroad, create fake costs, etc. it happens now as well, but the scale could be much bigger.
As usually, big players would be able to avoid taxes, so the one who would be hurt most are the "middle class". Taxes will eat their profits and the gap between the best earning people and the rest would be growing and growing.
For me it looks a bit as if we were trying to solve the problems caused by goods redistribution by applying more goods redistribution.
It's a type of insurance if you will. If I participate in the system, I can be reasonably sure that were I to lose my job, I wouldn't end up on the streets.
A spectacular example of why this is a good thing is J.K Rowling who was able to write Harry Potter because the British welfare system kept her in reasonably good shape after she lost her job -> http://imgur.com/gallery/FIQYq
I've never understood the exact differences between basic income and social security, but it fundamentally feels like such a safety net should exist.
The difference is that everybody gets basic income, and not just the unemployed. You don't get a sharp division between the employed and the unemployed, your welfare won't get cut when you start earning money. Work is always rewarded, and it's easier to get out of the poverty trap.
And for the countries that have already got welfare, the argument of "But nobody is going to work!" is already out the window. If that were a real problem, everybody would already be on welfare.
Yes there are people that abuse it. The vast majority doesn't. Even if it's just because they couldn't look their friends in the eye if they did.
The same people who are paying for the other welfare, unemployment and disability payments, the lower tax brackets for lower incomes, etc. Those are all things that basic income could eventually replace.
It's not like there's free money coming out of nowhere, it's simply a smarter and more efficient way to distribute the money that's already there.
The big advantage of basic income, though, is that it rewards working more than what we currently have. It's currently possible for someone on welfare who gets a part-time minimum wage job, to end up worse off. With basic income, you always get ahead when you work more.
I highly doubt that.
In my opinion the current european social system destroys incentives to work and take responsibility for ones own live.
Most countries contemplating this already spend a lot of money a whole host of welfare and various support and safety net systems, as well as the massive bureaucracy needed to administer these systems. By replacing the massive patchwork of existing systems with one simplified and unified system, you can save a lot of money through reduced bureaucracy and increased efficiency.
Basically this system won't be added to what is currently there but replacing an already expensive and highly inefficient system. So while it may end up being slightly more expensive it won't simply be a completely new cost added to the budget. There may even be secondary savings from things like reduced crime rates and increased health.
Just look at all the social "safety nets" that many European countries have. That money then gets relabled "basic income". Pensions, unemployment benefits, paid sick leave, child support money, etc...
For people who are working full-time and don't get anything at the moment, the taxes would have to be increased slightly to offset their "basic income" on average, so maybe with a low wage you would have a small gain, with a big wage you would have slightly less than before.
The advantage could be a massive reduction in bureaucracy. The disadvantage in Europe at least is that many people prefer perceived "fairness" over efficiency, i.e. they are more worried that someone who "should not get that money" will get it than they are worried about their social systems wasting money and peoples' time.
The real question is why are we hindering the whole of humanity in terms of social development, medical and technical research, environmental management and..pretty much everything.. because we are beholden to an artificial system of numerical control (ie: money and finance) which we invented as a tool for stability and control, but has become a total, fucked-up liablity because the numbers don't line up properly and has large parts of the world limiting themselves artificially (ie: austerity measures) just to make the digits on a spreadsheet tick over in the right way.
We need to reset, respawn and start again.
Edit: And because my original post doesn't make it clear, I mean we need something other than 'money', ie: get rid of the whole damn concept, or reengineer it completely - something a few notches below 'shoot all the bankers and accountants'.
..and now back to my day job in support.
Beside, without some form of solidarity, a society tends to degrade into some "every man for himself" : the poors use violence (that's all they have), the richs task evasion because they feel no obligation to their fellow men. We have too many examples of that, local or national.
The mechanisms you describe might happen but they may be minor forces in the end. A real economic system is very complex, many many forces and behaviours are at work (and many are social/cultural). A complex reactive organism.
So no, this experience is not silly and it's hard to see what it will produce.
> Let's forget about the question if this is moral or not to take away money from people who are working hard just to give away these money to those, who are not working at all.
In civilized countries those who are not working at all are already given money that's taken from the rich. The big difference with a basic income is that those who are working hard at low-paying jobs also get money.
> the taxation will make costs of work higher and higher. Country economy would become less competitive.
A country with closer income equality will be more pleasant to live in, so maybe people will be willing to work for lower take-home wages and this will balance the higher income tax.
It would be good to have some kind of international tax settlement though. Otherwise we have a race to the bottom (we already see that with corporation tax and e.g. Ireland) that ends in no country being able to tax and the whole world (except for the very rich) being worse off.
> In addition avoiding taxes would start to be really profitable - people would start opening fake companies abroad, create fake costs, etc. it happens now as well, but the scale could be much bigger.
People already avoid tax as much as they can, I don't think this would change that. If you're the kind of person who avoids 40% tax you would still avoid 30% tax, IMO.
> As usually, big players would be able to avoid taxes, so the one who would be hurt most are the "middle class".
The whole idea of it being universal is that it's the working / lower middle class that benefits the most. Blindly assuming that the rich are just not going to pay their taxes is no way to run a government - if they're not paying, make them pay.
When I see that discussion about basic income I am
always wandering, who is going to pay for that?
Let's forget about the question if this is moral or
not to take away money from people who are working
hard just to give away these money to those, who are
not working at all.
Your interpretation of 'moral' here is a narrow one. Socialism is a moral economic solution; it's just not as efficient as well-regulated free markets. In a post-labour-scarcity society this will broadly be moot anyway as much fewer of us will have marketable skills.
Update: I say socialism isn't as efficient as well-regulated free markets. It actually depends on the market. The UK's NHS for example covers the entire population and costs less per capita than the US spends on Medicare (which only manages to cover the elderly). Funding healthcare through insurance creates moral hazard, conflicting incentives, information asymmetry, etc. which adds up to a deeply inefficient market.
Isn't part of the problem there that the US Prison System is a for-profit industry?
Poverty and the pathetically ineffective "War on Drugs" put them there, and the prison system's focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation keeps them imprisoned and/or reoffending.
Imagine the economic effect of having 1% of the population turned from being a cost-drain to being young healthy tax-payers. The reduced load on policing. The fact that people would be less afraid of crime. Imagine the economic boost if people could interact with their neighbours and build communities without fear.
Sure, in reality it wouldn't be as rosy as that, but chances are it'd be a darn sight better than where we are now.
The US doesn't have so many in prison because it's for profit.
Universal basic income amounts to (providing or) paying for food, clothing and shelter. What is the cost of food when we have labgrown meat, the robots till the farm and self-driving cars deliver it everywhere?
What's the cost of shelter with industrial scale 3d-printing and robotic assembly?
What is the cost of providing everyone with basic clothing when all the factory workers are replaced with robots?
Stop worrying about the price of everything and start thinking in terms of scarcity. Will the stuff required for basic human survival still be prohibitively scarce in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years?
The cost of land plus the cost of raw materials plus the cost of extending the necessary infrastructure, so basically the same as today.
What is the cost of providing everyone with basic clothing when all the factory workers are replaced with robots?
The cost of raw materials plus the cost of machinery, so basically the same as today.
Basic labor is incredibly cheap today, (desirable) land and resources aren't.
If the former, then it will be seen as almost immoral or evil to give a comfortable wage to someone who didn't earn it.
If the latter, then it will be seen as almost immoral for the one guy who owns the robotic factory to reap all of the profit and earn a fortune every year by having made workers redundant.
The third option is to eschew automation entirely and keep a steady supply of make-work jobs, just to justify enough salaries to keep everybody from starving. Which strikes me as more dystopian than the oligarchy in option #2.
We don't so much eschew robotics, as under-bid them. McDonalds finds it cheaper to hire humans than automate - for now. (The touch screen, card-accepting menus I've seen appearing lately, make the case that this won't last much longer.)
Yes, I did start off stipulating "in a heavily automated society". I don't think we're quite there yet, but we will be soon, and increasing our make-work programs in lock-step with the progress of automation is a quick road to dystopia #3.
It is true (and sad, I think) that many people, given basic income, will do nothing to improve themselves or their surroundings. But I still think basic income is an idea worth pursuing.
[1]: http://paczemoj.blogspot.com/2011/11/limes-inferior-chp-1.ht...
There's enough money wasted on stuff I consider more useless and at least this experiment has the potential to generate surprises. I'm all for experimenting with economic systems, worst case it generates some new ideas.
Good on you Utrecht - I love the bold thinking. It might not work - but at least they tried something new to address one of our oldest problems!
In theory, sure. But in reality, most jobs suck. Even if you are of that level, odds are the job you'll get is going to be emotionally or mentally draining, and at the end of the day, you'll really just want to relax.
Do you have any evidence for the existence of these lazy people, and in any significant number? The literature and actual experiments done with basic income shows that people are not lazy, but rather they lack opportunities, or a safety net for small risks, or any of a number of other things.
Basically, people who were working out of desperation worked less, otherwise people used the money to ensure food safety, invest in businesses or improving their lives.
I really don't think "lazy" is a valuable label. It tends to be applied when there are underlying causes for the supposed "laziness". When those causes are repaired the laziness tends to go away. For example: illness, precarity, hopelessness (as you mentioned), a lack of opportunities. I'd suggest doing away with the overly simplistic "lazy" and using more accurate words which express the underlying causes.
Not everyone is smart enough to be productive in a competitive society.
The basic income is going to prevent larger potential problems with them, like crime or health costs or decreasing property values or other social expenses, beyond their immediate income expense.
These people already cost you money. The basic income is the option where you pay them little now so you don't have to pay a lot for them later.
Many people who are in long term unemployment already feel that way. (I think that's my case.)
There is no political motivation to just take unemployed people and just create businesses and do something with them, so I think it's a problem of entrepreneurship. It should be a huge opportunity, but it's not getting done for a simple reason, people consider lazy people to be subhuman moocher and they don't want to deal with them. It is plain stigmatization. People pity the unemployed, but they don't want to help them eitherway.
The thing about the UBI, is that it simplifies the process of welfare, but it also stimulates consumption, which in turn boosts the economy.
If everyone is getting BI, I'm expecting rent to go up. Like, waaaaaaay up. Up to the point where no one can live from BI anymore.
With BI, you increase the purchase power of a whole bunch of poor people. People that didn't live in the city before, now think they have a shot and can afford rent for a while and get a job in the city!
Demand goes up, prices go up. If you still want to live in the city, you will need to spend all of your BI-income AND all of your pay on the VERY SAME basic necessities.
Sounds pretty obvious to me and I can't really see it turn out any other way.
Moving back to the country side, where it's cheap ? Ok, you can live from BI, but you still don't have a job, your kids don't get a proper education and their future looks just like yours. Barely getting by and sitting around watching tv.
Turning it into a substitute for all welfare payments would be prohibitively expensive. But it might work as one element of the safety net....
Although the basic income has so far failed to take off, it does have a commonplace cousin: the tax-free allowance....
It is feasible only if it is small, and complemented by more targeted anti-poverty measures.
Basic income: the clue is in the name. "
Full Link: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21651897...
Also of interest (US trying basic income): http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/11/go...
However, I suspect a lot of the people who are championing basic income are implicitly envisioning living in a relatively comfortable apartment in the Bay area from which they can follow their muse--not public housing in Detroit.
We will say that 5 people have the following monthly incomes [ 0, 500, 500, 2000, 3000, 4000] Our economy only makes one good: bread. There are 1000 loaves of bread produced. Assuming everyone spends all of their money, since there is a total of 10000 dollars, the price of bread will be 10 dollars. Each person can buy = [ 0, 50, 50, 200, 300, 400]
Now, let's say in 2016, everyone gets 500 extra dollars from some outside source, giving incomes [ 500, 1000, 1000, 2500, 3500, 4500] There are now 13000 dollars. The price of bread will be 13 dollars. Each person can buy [ 38, 76, 192, 269, 346]
Some people can buy more bread. Some can buy less.
My guess would be a more so organic reaction to labour predictions.
In any case, the relationship between technologists/futurologists and basic income advocacy would be that basic income is the solution to an ever-shrinking labor market as automation gets better. Sort of an exit strategy from the current economic regime.
It does a great job of both stimulating my imagination and being a fun topic of conversation.
For history's sake, I first came upon mention of it on this website, while searching for 'the art of conversation' which was a phrase that i randomly googled.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/artofconv.htm http://www.basicincome.com/
It would be strange if people weren't think about it.
But won't someone have to pay all those annoying taxes? And when we go to spend other people's money, won't someone have to be there earning that money?
Europeans from small countries love to tout their welfare policies as "so much better" than places like the U.S., but they ignore one massive difference: Small European countries are localized, ethnically homogenous populations. The U.S. has to deal with more land, and more people, from more places. You cannot make an apples-to-apples comparison between welfare systems in the U.S. and small countries.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... ~80% White/Dutch
So both nations have a similar level of "ethnically homogenous populations".
No.
There is more than "white" and "all other ethnicities." Considering geneology is important when designing systems like healthcare, for example. If a disease is isolated to a gene present in only people of Irish descent, and not Scandanavian descent, then the country with more Irish people will pay a higher healthcare cost than one with less. The more unique subsets of genes present in a population, the greater the ethnic diversity. Since the U.S. is comprised almost entirely of immigrants, it will naturally have a more ethnically heterogenous population than a country with population centers dating back millenia.
In order to reduce the amount of money needed to support the BI scheme, you are given a card to buy some standardized products: jeans, bread, soup, chairs, tables, beds, bikes, ubuntu and the like. The main point is that those products are cheaper to produce and distribute. You lose some of the power of money but since society is paying the bill I think you should accept the deal.
Edited: grammar and shorter.
I imagine partitioning living NEEDS [housing, food, transportation] as an area of the economy with its own money/token/basic-income-credits system separate from the WANT economy of everything else.
For sure you won't have problem find user, the churn rate would be very low, and you will really change the word.
I believe the best way to spend the money is to help people who work hard to improve themselves, regardless of their income level. The money is given according to the impact of the money. So people with low income would benefit proportionally more because the before and after difference is larger percentage wise.
Edit: The thing that should redistributed is not wealth, but opportunity.
..and this is not cynism, just regular public choice.
If it happens I can assure you it won't be within your lifetime or your children's lifetime.
Also why would I pay you to dig a hole and bury it? Are we really so dense that we have to give people free money and not find them anything to do? No. I believe humanity is greater than that. I have a dream about a world where we all have the power to tell someone to mow the lawn or clean up the house AT THE VERY LEAST.
Though mowing the lawn... that could be automated today.
>guaranteed job idea are that it presupposes a judgment about what types of work are inherently valuable (and does so at the cost of exploring the unknown)
Picking up the trash and cleaning up the neighborhood are unknown high risk ventures? Fixing pot-holes, washing graffiti off walls, planting trees, picking litter off the beach, helping the environment have no benefit to society? There are PLENTY of jobs that can be created that are not high risk ventures and can benefit all of society. I'm not proposing to start another NASA program.
Are you trying to say that paying people money to sit on their asses while entire cities have thousands of little problems is a more worthwhile venture then telling someone to help out the community in exchange for the same amount of money? Your reasoning being that we as human beings are not intelligent enough to make judgement about which types of work are more valuable?
Make a judgement on this: which is more valuable? Helping the community for money OR sitting on your ass for money?
my reason: handing out cash destroys the incentives to do better and improve...and not all necessary jobs are actual fun to do and others would surely completely vanish...
i want do dispute this. it disregards and diminishes true slavery. having to support one self is not slavery but the normal way of living...
Or you'll get VERY biased results.
Think of it: they could have tested the financing instead. 300 workers get to pay 1300€/m to the city. Who wants to be first?
So let's change it to a Basic Income of 1000+/m for everybody...
Many will loose a lot... because that's what France is already spending, for a lot less than 40ish M citizens.
I know downvoters would love this to work.
But think about it: today, the system cares for people with a handicap (for which 1000/m is not enough), for single families (for which 1000/m is not enough), etc... You just can't have everybody receive the same amount and remove help from those who need more...
So Basic Income will need much more money than what is already spent... just to take care of inequalities it will create.
If you think a country like France needs more redistribution (than 1/3 of the GDP), okay... but Basic Income will not achieve that.
Proponents often say BI will replace social spending. I think that's impossible.
If you just want more taxes, just say it. Be clear. BI is not clear at all, even if it looks easy to understand.
Source: http://www.contrepoints.org/2013/09/30/140878-france-champio...
I would be really fine with receiving a basic income. From the social side I would support it. People can do what they like, like artists, developers, and creative people. May be there will be the next business opportunity, startup from that work. Yes, may be other people are lazy, that is like today.
There is a big BUT. Where does the money comes from to support this basic income? All those experiments, which are regarded as successful had the wonderful position, that the money came from outside. From the outside there was money put into the experiment, including the so successful experiment in Canada, where 75% of the money came from Ottawa, people, which where not part of the experiment.
I have not seen any experiment, the people taking part in the basic income have supported them-selfs, meaning the money for the basic income came from within this community. Only if the money can come from within the community them-self I would regard that experiment as successful.
Let's normalize the total amount of money of today at 100.
If the economic grow of a 5% a year, in 365 days the total amount of money will be 105, where those 5 come from ?
Suppose you build a fountain, you pay whoever physically build it, and your money go from you to the builder, the total amount of money in the system is the same, it just change hand, however now your city enjoy a new fountain which bring some amount of new value.
There's a lot of complaining about how it will make people 'sit around and eat ice cream' as if that's all the unemployed do. They've clearly not gone outside much. The unemployed drink a lot of beer, they do meth and they walk around aimlessly through the city and generally cause all kinds of damages and harm.
I live in the east of The Netherlands with pretty high unemployment, and it's already quite visible. But I've been to San Francisco and that's just horrible. I can't imagine how a rich person (and you have to be rich to live there) would want to live there amongst so many homeless and desperate poor people. Would it really be so bad to pay a bit of extra tax just so those people have a little less shitty lives and don't need to stroll around the SF center? It's not like they enjoy that.
Of course, it's not 100% certain that the basic income will solve that particular problem, but I feel it's worth a shot, so I'm happy Utrecht is trying it.
edit: Also let's remember that most people are simply decent. There's not much wrong with watching American Idol and eating some ice cream. If people do decide to not work under basic income (I don't think the majority will) they won't because they have a satisfying way to spend their time at home or wherever. Why is that a bad thing?
If you remove all those also to finance basic income, then you are taking the money who really need it.
If you are saying - like some who support basic income - here is your basic income and now you need private health care and also all those other things of the safety net removed, than this is pure capitalism in the form of "take it or leave it".
I am more for the safety net. I am the one who also pays extra for public health care. I could easily switch to private health care and safe some big bucks monthly. No, because public health care is an important part for the society.
All the working financing models I have seen so far meant: less then 500 EUR as basic income, which does not work. Or they took the money from important parts of the social net.
May be there would one financing model: remove the costs for the military system. But that will never happen, I assume.
The idea is that it would reduce the expense on health care services because people would become ill less often. Whether this is true remains to be tested on a larger scale, but I think some research has pointed to this being the case.
I think you are right, 500 euro would be extra spending money, not a basic income and quite possibly would have the reverse effect. It's why the basic income in Utrecht is 900, which is enough to live off as a single person.
That's the thing: the money is already there. Most countries already have an extensive (and expensive) social security system. The problem is that they tend to have a lot of administrative overhead, and they effectively punish people for working, because they lose the social security payments once they get a job.
Basic income is basically the same thing, except that it's also for people who work. Same rule for everybody.
When monetary systems break down, for reasons such as a lack of liquidity, people fall back to the barter system. I'll give you a sack of potatoes for your hours of legal services. We're still playing the same game, but the "Monopoly Bank" ran out of paper, so we're using IOUs and direct asset exchange.
Being poor is just a state where the person lacks liquidity. Bank bailouts were enacted to "rehydrate" banks. Basic income is the bailout idea extended to the individual level.
Currencies are only valuable to you for 2 reasons: there's a finite amount, and other people value it (because they can also trade it for stuff). There's no finite amount of currency that satisfies a person; people can sense the total quantity of currency and want a fraction of this; this is why "printing money" or otherwise increasing the total pool of a currency causes inflation.
If Basic Income has a tax or other system to remove equal amounts currency from the pool, then the system might work; you would be transferring value from Producers to Consumers, much like many social programs do today.
But if there is no tax or other mechanism to remove currency from the pool, Basic Income will just create massive inflation, as the total amount of currency gets bigger, each piece of currency just becomes less valuable.
Basic Income isn't a different game. This is still the same economics. We're just adding another input to the system, everything still flows in, around, and out the same. Many poor people lack liquidity, but why they lack liquidity is because they lack something that other humans value more than their own money or assets.