Request For Research: Basic Income

If housing, education, food, and energy were made super cheap through technology we could provide those services instead of a basic income.

Given plentiful resources what stops us from multiplying until we consume all available resources. Perhaps, if we had basic income it should only be provided once people turn 18. That way parents wouldn't keep having kids in order to get more money.

Housing: Looking to Buckminster Fuller. He wanted to have houses assembled from modular components that could be shipped. Standardization of parts would make things cheap.

Food: Robotics and biotechnology can increase yields and bring down costs. Also, aquaponics is an extremely productive system. It uses 5% of the way that traditional agriculture uses and fish consume only 1/10th the feed that cattle do. Also, duckweed (it grows like a weed) is easy to grow and feed the fish.

Education: Stop with the college model already. Technology is the answer. Look at Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, etc. For education that needs more hands on training bring back the apprenticeship model. Let them get their education / training for free in exchange for working for free in the field for a limited time.

Infrastructure: Public transportation needs to be a priority. Cars sit idle 95% of the time. Once we have self-driving cars they should be pooled. Just schedule a time to be picked up.

For basic income, we might want to only provide it for people age 18+. Otherwise parents will just have tons of kids in order to collect checks. That will lead to overpopulation and eventually consuming all available resources.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

You might want to look into Georgism and Geolibertarianism as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

The basic premise of all these is that land and natural resources can not be owned. If you want to use them you have to rent / buy rights to them. That rent goes into a basic fund that is then used for basic income. The basic argument is that land belongs to everyone, so everyone should get an equal share of the rent from the land.

As far as food goes, wouldn't the prices of luxury foods, like porterhouse steaks and the cost of going out to eat likely increase rapidly? I mean, no one needs to eat expensive food, but isn't the purpose of the basic income to prevent people from having to eat ramen 3 times/day?

One of my personal hopes with Basic Income is that it addresses this issue by providing a safety net so that people who's livelihood relies the existence of the status quo can be liberated from the incentive to keep the status quo. For example, our government creates a Department for Homeland Security to address threats. It employs thousands of people. What happens if the threats go away and the department is no longer needed? Suddenly thousands of people are out of a job. That's thousands of people with an incentive to keep the department in business, which requires threats to our homeland security. Multiply this example across not just government institutions but private as well. People have an incentive to keep their gravy train running, even if it does irreparable harm. We need to remove this incentive so we can have faster iteration cycles, not just for socio-political ideas, but all ideas. Hopefully, a basic income can remove these perverse incentives by giving people a safety net. They're not afraid to lose their job, or move on from a shitty job, because they know they and their family won't go hungry, homeless, or without access to medical care.