Request For Research: Basic Income • Hacker News Board

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#991

Post by irremediable » Fri, Jan 29, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

ultramancool wrote: post #330

aggronn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) How is this more inefficient than our existing welfare system? Seems a lot more efficient to give everyone money rather than spend $100M on bureaucratic infrastructure for verification and employment tracking. 2) It benefits society because you no longer have to work to live. This affects how you make decisions about your employment. You would be more likely to change jobs when you're unhappy, for example. This is…

> Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn't there to prove "additional income support". The system could be set up so that after basic income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--people making $40k wouldn't have $10k in free money to spend, because their taxes would go up $10k a year, for example. > So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you we…

> So basically as a middle class person, I don't benefit at all, I may even lose money, but some kid who has no income and wants to live in his parents basement gets $10k/yr for contributing nothing to society? Am I understanding this correctly?

The benefit for you is that you'd be living in a better society. Hopefully, you'd see reductions in crime, improvements in various service jobs, etc.

That kid gets $10k/year, sure, but then again lots of people already have the means to live in their parents' basements. Most of them prefer not to do so.

However, there'll be other people getting that $10k/year. Single mothers could spend more time with their children. More people would become educated. The job market would become more liquid for employees, hopefully improving working conditions.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#992

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 29, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

punee wrote: post #894

rmc wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the very rich people today? They have practically enough money to live on. Why do they continue to work? Quick! Let's tax them at 100% so that they have an inventive to work!

Why would they need an incentive when they already continue to work on their own?

[deleted]

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#993

Post by jpindar » Fri, Jan 29, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #509

ascorbic wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money for the basic income comes from taxation. Even though everyone would get it, higher tax rates on people with middle or high incomes would mean they were no better off, or worse off. This isn't supposed to be a way to make everyone $x per month better off, it's a way to change incentives and replace welfare.

What I'm curious about is what's stopping a large portion of the population from simply quitting their jobs to live off basic income, thus decreasing the potential pool from which taxes to pay for basic income can be extracted? If it really worked out like you say it would, where people with middle or high incomes are no better off, I wonder what they would think when suddenly large swathes of the population are able…

Most people don't want to be poor.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#994

Post by Eridrus » Fri, Jan 29, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #987

Eridrus wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of basic income, fixing housing is super important since it's one of the biggest drains on everyone's income and the fixed nature of it suggests that just giving everyone more money will cause a lot of that money to just end up in landlord's pockets. I think a lot of the change must be policy change though and cannot be purely free-market oriented since there is a public interest in seeing more housing sto…

> just giving everyone more money will cause a lot of that money to just end up in landlord's pockets. Are they not providing a valuable service? I mean you say this as if it's blatantly obvious that this is a negative consequence.

I don't think there would be any additional value created by giving them more money, they would simply be capturing more of the value that exists, and I don't think enriching moneyed special interests with no gain to the general populace is good policy.

And I also don't think they are creating any significant value so much as extracting rents.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#995

Post by JoeAltmaier » Fri, Jan 29, 2016, 11:35 PM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #960

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you're just being stubborn. Regular incomes that happen whether you work or now, are almost identical to the BI. How are those example different? Constructive arguments are more interesting than "No they aren't, neener neener".

Hi Joe, sorry to come across that way to you. They're not the same because: -Social security (means tested, dehumanising and bad for self-worth/esteem) -Pensions (only handed out to older people who are probably in a less creative phase of their lives) -Allowances (whilst close it is unlikely to be completely unconditional and usually tied to an emotional/familial bond which comes with it's own set of baggage) -Annui…

The 'unconditional' part is only important in the beginning. Once the subject qualifies (begins receiving the annuity) then the criterion is irrelevant to studying their behavior while receiving the benefit.

For the person receiving them, those things listed offer the same benefits as BI - money regularly received no matter how you behave. To determine what effect that has on people, then we need simply record those results to get a large data set.

To fund even a tiny study (a dozen people?) for a tiny amount of time (5 years?) would cost an exorbitant amount. Its kind of silly to even talk about. Especially when we have data sets of millions of people in almost the same circumstances.

I read this proposal as absurd. Its typical of Silicon Valley to imagine getting results from a tiny study (focus groups etc) that are worth anything.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#996

Post by entwife » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 1:14 AM UTC

semafour wrote: post #39

mattkrisiloff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a big reason we want to do it for 5 years -- things may look different in the longer term.

Is five years long enough to get a real reaction? Unless somebody is on the verge of retirement, and they want to keep working after the experiment, they must consider staying in the job pool or have difficulty getting hired in five years. To see how people would react to a government-provided basic income, which would presumably be fore life, the study may have to emulate that more perfectly. Nevertheless, I'm very…

Does the basic income prevent people from doing work? Or from doing work they hate?

A correctly designed study will attempt to teach the participants to (1) have basic spending/expenses that match their income (2) procure the basic income from already-available sources (e.g. food stamps, subsidised health care, social security...) and (3) form income-pooling groups that provide/insure a basic income for their members. All three have already been done at a small scale. 100s of people in the United States currently practice #3, e.g. Federation of Egalitarian Communities. 1000s of people practice #2, e.g. Puna Hawaii or your local trailer park.

I think basic income would have the effect of insurance, to allow individuals to take bigger risks and follow their dreams more.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#997

Post by DominikR » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

melbourne_mat wrote: post #964

DominikR wrote: post #152

> 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. Is this really a problem in Western societies? I haven't heard of famines or people starving to death here. I believe that most people work for social status, so they can keep up with the people surrounding them. > I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without…

"Is this really a problem in Western societies?" All the people you know are not starving. There are however many folks - even in rich countries - who would not eat without the help of charity programs. Many of them are living on the streets.

Objectively no one has to fear starving to death as in our societies we collectively make sure that this is not possible.

It doesn't matter how exactly this is organised, but it is a fact that we do.

This can also be proven by the fact that there are exactly 0 cases of people starving to death here.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#998

Post by moca » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #170

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…

If we look at how much technologies have advanced over last decades, the economy produces more than enough output for basic needs, which can be distributed to everyone without much burden.

We can simply offer basic income for everyone, then we can get rid of most special rules, such as food stamps, minimum wage, all kinds of deductibles, flexible spending, childcare. We can tax all incomes at fixed rate and be done with it. All these can be trivially tracked by simple computer system, the only thing needed is identify verification once a year or two.

We would have a much greater society and economy, and avoid the need of "job creation like Walmart".

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#999

Post by sbardle » Sun, Jan 31, 2016, 1:03 PM UTC

I would investigate implementing a basic income through the creation of an alternative currency system. That is, everyone who subscribes to the system, gets a certain number of free credits equivalent to 10k a year, in exchange for certain responsibilities. I don't see how it can be done using the existing fiat currencies at the moment due to lack of political support, but if you could pilot and trial it on say Bitcoin, then you might be able to scale it at a later date when the political climate has changed and everyone understands that software is eating (or has already eaten) the world.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#1000

Post by aug-riedinger » Mon, Feb 01, 2016, 9:59 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #892

tim333 wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what needs fixing. People spend what they earn. What's the big problem?

People not having a buffer of money is a huge problem. Not saving for retirement is also a problem the way things are right now.

That's from your 100% rational point of view.

Some people just don't act rationality, including in their money management. There is nothing to fix here. You could say, "if they are unhappy at the end, there is something to fix".

Most rational people don't understand this because of the logic: you don't want to produce a future unhappiness.

Let's take a softer example: in a winter morning, how should you dress up?

Well, a rational mind would look at the weather forecast, open his window to feel the outside temperature and dress up accordingly.

But some other people won't care. The "effort" required to make the right decision is too high, the gain is too low, why care after all?

For those people, there are three outcomes possible:

1. they took a good decision without the information and will be happier than the rational guys, because they did not have to care about taking the decision and the outcome was good

2. they took a bad decision but still it was not worth the effort and even if they got a little cold during a few hours, they'll make it at the end

3. they took a bad decision which they must turned into bad enough consequences so that they should have cared (eg. they got cold)

And the best is that in category #3, a rational person would learn from what happened and avoid to reproduce it, but being irrational allows the person to not learn from its experience.

The conclusion to this is that since most of our decision making in everyday life is rational, it is hard to understand those who don't act the same way. Also we all are more or less rational, because that's what society forces us to be in respect of the others. But some topic, like how to spend money, or dress in the morning are left to one's freedom, and must not be controlled by some higher rationality.

Nothing proves us that the irrational outcome won't be better that the rational one. What if outcome #1 is the most realistic one?

We are too rational.