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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

We wouldn't need money for most benefits any more (pensions, income support, etc) so that's about £120bn of the £240bn found immediately. You mention the NHS - we'd be able to spend a lot less on that if people didn't have poverty-induced health problems, so there's another £35bn (assuming a 30% reduction of the £110bn). It's not unreasonable to assume that the difference of £85bn would essentially pay for itself by increasing the tax revenue from people spending their basic income. over time the country's GDP and tax revenue would increase due to people being better off (they go hand-in-hand).

This could well be cost neutral for the UK.

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> It's not unreasonable to assume that the difference of £85bn would essentially pay for itself by increasing the tax revenue from people spending their basic income.

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.

It's also worth remembering that at the moment everyone in the UK gets a tax free allowance of £10,600 and an NI free allowance of about £8000 (in 2015/16). The basic income is expected to replace that as well, which means if everyone continues to earn the same amounts that's an extra £2000 per person earning more than £10k (roughly, assuming it's now taxed at 20% in the first tax bracket). NI would be less, and is probably more complex as employers pay some of that, but just assuming that only the employees contributions are now paid on what was previously NI free you're still looking at another £1k each. It's not much individually, but when you take out the costs of administering all of that it'll add up.

Why would poverty related health problems disappear unless the basic income is significantly higher than the current unemployment or disability benefits as you're saying those are being replaced.

A basic income doesn't remove the potential for poverty.

Yeah I'm sure you could find that missing £85bn down the back of a sofa in whitehall.

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.

> it's another incentive to have more children and bigger families

Should be easy to back that wild claim up with statistics. Can you?

My inner pessimist is expecting to see a "there was this Daily Mail article one time".

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

There's evidence on a national scale that birthrate is anticorrelated with wealth. The better off people are on average, the less kids they have.

This is not true; on average richer men have more children.

If you try and slice it by family you find that the 'traditional' family makes up a fairly small percentage of the population.

This TED talk focuses on the anticorrelation I wrote about: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y....

Richer countries have lower birth rates.

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.

Ok, I think I should have written "international scale", I apologize for the confusion.

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.

I have seen this stat from a few studies.

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.

I have heard the opposite from many studies as well. You linked a post that spawned many, many rebuttals by various organizations.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/richer-people-w...

http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/10/the-rich-vs-poor-debate-a...

Both of those ignore the education factor.

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.

is it a smooth relationship, or is it more of a step function with 1 steps?

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."

From what I heard, in very poor countries children are often treated as investment. A child can start paying itself off by working as soon as even 5 years after being born. As a parent, you want someone to take care of you when you're old, and given high children mortality, you're better off making more of them in hope at least one survives to adulthood. Basically, those people are too poor to afford not having many children.

This is rapidly becoming ancient history. There's a wonderful youtube video showing all the countries on earth, moving on a multimensional chart by infant mortality and standard of living. The origin is ideal. All countries but 1 or two have shot like arrows toward the origin over the last century.

This talk by Hans Rosling may be what you are referring to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dymPP9RhPjw

Across countries this is a very noisy cloud of points where, if you go out and calculate a regression it's pointing down. Like every other social variable.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dymPP9RhPjw

A talk by Hans Rosling[1] on the subject.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling

Statistics have nothing to do with it. Either the incentive exists, or it doesn't. Ask for a citation/study/logical-argument on that, not statistics.

But bear in mind: Statistics could indicate the extent that the incentive is having on the incentivized population group, if at all.

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