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Comment by frogpelt | Hacker News Reader

The basic income concept is intriguing to me (because it simplifies things) but I do not think it will work for this reason: Who administers the basic income? The government and by extension politicians. Once they have every single person who breathes on the dole, this will give them unbelievable leverage against the people. If the government is giving everyone a check, how hard is it to argue that the check should be more? Not hard. How hard is it to reduce the amount of the check. Almost impossible.

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.

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"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."

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.

good choice of examples: purchase a purse that costs as much as a used car or save a daughter (not a son).

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.

At which point we rapidly approach the theory of the "utility monster".

> 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.

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 think you're right that a lot of things like roads are a huge net benefit to everyone. But those are things, not money.

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?

If a job is so unpleasant that people will only do it to avoid abject poverty and its miseries then something is wrong with that job. Probably that window manufacturing job could have been much more pleasant given the right process changes, but the factory owner was not incentivized to try because they could find someone willing / forced to accept that job as it was. In essence, basic income does away with wage slavery, but that is a good thing. Those goods will still get made, but they won't get made in the same way. Though to be honest, most places will probably not bother making the job nicer and will just move it to somewhere where wage slavery is still legal.

I'll be honest: even if you gave me unlimited money to fix it, I wouldn't want to work there. It was already about as robotic as it could get and yes, there were definitely a few things that could have made it less bad, but I don't think that job could be good.

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.

Basic income would only cover essentials such as shelter and food. While some people would choose to work because they enjoy their jobs, many would work to be able to buy a nice car, dishwasher, TV and other non-essentials. Unpleasant jobs might be the only choice for some people, particularly for unskilled workers.

Basic income is only money, though. You don't control whether someone pays rent or buys $x worth of beer with it.

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.

Providing food and shelter versus cash makes the government have to solve all the distribution issues(something that I think we need a benevolent AI to do for us), making the dole actually be food makes entire groups eat the same food, countrywide chicken casserole nights will become a real thing.

Window making being a terrible job is new information to me. What was so bad?

I have to assume you haven't worked with glass much. Maybe artisan glassblowers enjoy it, but at the factory level it's pretty miserable.

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.

I think these sorts of things can still find solutions under BI. By eliminating wage slavery, only those that are compensated proportionally to the risks will take on the work.

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 can really sympathize with that having been one of the people subject to those externalities, but at the same time, I have to wonder just how many such goods there are and which industries would collapse.

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.

> asking any government to take money from the people [...] and magically produce a net benefit to the people is [...] impossible

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.

>Once they have every single person who breathes on the dole, this will give them unbelievable leverage against the people.

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.

> 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.

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.

Simple enough: clearing the lazy, the unmotivated, and the unaccountable from our labor market would make it easier to get work done (less drain from employees who don't contribute); make work more pleasant (surrounded by motivated colleagues who value what they do); and eliminate competition from useless employees who leech jobs, artificially inflate the labor supply and tarnish average applicant quality because they'd rather stay home and do nothing (improving employees' position relative to employers).

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.

all of the problems you just described can be solved by simply firing a bad employee or not hiring bad ones in the first place.

I'm still not following why paying them to do nothing is necessary.

>all of the problems you just described can be solved by simply firing a bad employee or not hiring bad ones in the first place.

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.

ok, that makes a bit more sense. thanks for explaining.

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?

Because right now those fired employees still _need_ to work, so they apply somewhere else. Even the most incompetent eventually get past the filters and gum up someone else's operation. So we have a cycle in which we harden the filters (e.g. day-long interviews for programming jobs) which makes life worse for everyone involved.

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.

> "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."

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.

America will be about the last place to attempt this, if the past (and our current welfare) are any guide.

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.

> 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!"

That's the common tactic of argument these days. The notion of "criticism" has been re-cast as "hate". Hate is more easily dismissed, ridiculed, and trivialized.

After re-reading your parent's statement a few times, I think (s)he thought I was saying you must dislike it if you're paying for it, but if you're not paying for it, you can't dislike it.

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."

I don't see the problem with this reading.

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).

"America will be about the last place to attempt this..."

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.)

Yeah, the APF was mentioned in the Medium article, and I'm familiar with it as I have family both who live in Alaska, and who have worked in the oil industry. Also, I've been to deadhorse myself, but I'm not sure that qualifies me for anything other than glancing at the pipeline now and again for hours and hours and hours on the Dalton.

> We have no competing group of people who are on welfare yet still CHOOSE to work to better their lives.

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...

> America will be about the last place to attempt this

We came much closer than anyone seems to remember under Nixon in the 70's.

http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/guaranteed-income%E2%...

"America will be about the last place to attempt this"

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.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/disability-usa/

Yup, I'm well aware of how the disability system is being used. But we all know increasing social services has been pretty much a toxic idea since at least the early 90s.

It's a toxic idea in the media, but it's not toxic enough for the bills and laws to be brought up by politicians in the first place.

I don't think killing motivation would be something to worry about. I can think of lots of examples of people who don't need to work but continue to do so anyway, from my own group of friends as well as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc etc.

I can see that being a problem but what about this solution (to be honest I don't see basic income becoming a thing in the United States in my life time)

Peg it to a CPI? GDP? Or maybe codify it in a constitutional amendment?

It also becomes a sacred cow. The bread dole was a huge issue for Rome once it got started because they really had no choice but to keep it up.

> 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.

Seems to work in late stage free markets dominated by 2-3 large-scale players.

Cutting all the programs needed to enable basic income would mean most public servants would lose their jobs.

I'm talking about elected officials.

The vast majority of bureaucrats are not elected officials

At which point they could go on basic income.

that's not a bad thing. reduces costs, reduces HR overhead, etc.

Yes, we understand the libertarian argument. We've had it shoved down our throats for years now.

>The government and by extension politicians.

You need a government that extends to the people who are being governed.

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