Request For Research: Basic Income

You need bread AND circuses.

TV, movies, reddit and video games are the modern circuses, but we need to make MEANING accessible.

Startups, with lowering barriers, are part answer. But not winner-take-all unicorns; more like long-tail lifestyle businesses. So that everyone can be uniquely useful, regardless of direction or ability (Ricardo's comparative advantage).

Why not basic commodities ? I mean distributing significant quantities of corn, corn-meal, flour, rice, a wide variety of beans, dried fruit, beets, onion, millet, granulated garlic, etc. The stuff that you can make a vast array of healthy foods out of.

This eliminates much of the possability of waste in the system, and at the same time it doesn't expose the individual to legal and privacy complications that come with 'income'. It translates into money in people's pockets indirectly because now their family's food budget is dramatically reduced.

I think this is a more elegant solution but the reason why it's difficult politically is because it incentivizes individuals and families to put more time and planning into home food preparation. There are billion dollar advertising campaigns aimed at conditioning the exact opposite behavior which is one reason why it's probably politically untenable at this time.

Also I'd like to raise another point which is that I find it somewhat disturbing that a major startup community leadership organization is so interested in possibly attempting to influence the national policy around financial issues in a way that is so far removed from the technology domain.

Are you guys a startup incubator or a think tank ? In other words are you busy conducting research to churn out position papers designed to influence the national debate on non-tech issues ? If so then how transparent do you plan on being with founders, past, present, and future about this entire process as it evolves going forward ?

The reason why I believe it's a bit of a stretch to consider this a tech issue is because in my view the idea that "technology is eliminating jobs" seems to be a false premise statistically speaking. To me it's a debate centered around how "free trade policy" is influencing the global job market and how that has impacted the United States economy. I believe that in the US at least the tech ecosystem has created more jobs, a whole new economy in fact which didn't exist before. It's the non-tech jobs that are gone, but they weren't eliminated by technological innovation as much as they were dispursed globally in the wake of certain regulations.

I don't know of a case in the USA where a public transit agency has done this without making transit worse.

For example, this was tried years ago in Santa Clara County. Called "Dial-a-Ride", the implementation was that an individual could call for a bus to pick him/her up and take to a given destination. The theory was that an assortment of people would all have origins and destinations along a common route, so you'd have a de facto ad hoc "bus route" for that collection of journeys.

But when you crunch the numbers even this ideal scenario, the time lag in chasing down and picking up the subsequent riders makes the trip time and length for the original rider uselessly long.

Nevertheless, this went on for years, with the result being that a handful of individuals got chauffered around at extremely high costs. It was computed that it would be much cheaper to have taxpayers pay for individual cab rides for everybody. Eventually, it was dropped, but it continued in south county for additional years.

And to this day, VTA is the financially worst-performing major transit system in the nation (as measured by percentage of farebox return on variable costs -- don't even ask about how much worse it is when fixed costs are added).