Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#711

Post by shkkmo »

MicroBerto wrote: post #632
misja111 wrote: post #317

What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don't seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they didn't work. I come from the Netherlands, which has always had unemployment benefits. Nowadays you get those only if you meet a bunch of strict conditions but it hasn't always been so tough. In the early eighties, there were almost no checks whatsoever. The r…

What I've found here on HN is that there is an extremely large amount of "wishful projection" and selection bias, in that many people here are young and promising entrepreneurs-in-training, and they believe that basic income will allow them to work on their startup dream without having to worry about paying the bills. While that may be true, they fail to realize that they are in the extreme minority of actually-motiv…

> While that may be true, they fail to realize that they are in the extreme minority of actually-motivated people who would make a good use-case of basic income.

> The vast majority of the world will fall into other categories, such as non-productivity or black markets. Not everyone wants to go build the next great app, folks!

The ratio of people who will find themselves something to do vs. people who will just veg and watch TV is unknown. You don't know and I don't know. Making an assumption either way is asinine, which is why we need things like this study.

Personally, I think we should introduce a small BI, gradually raise it until we find the sweet spot, then tie it to appropriate economic metrics, such as or median supplemental income. Ideally, this would be paired with a gradual reduction in the minimum wage so that number of economically viable jobs for those "idle hands and minds".

I am open to other suggestion for "What do you do with all of those idle hands and minds?", but you don't provide any. The only other solution I can see is to outlaw or limit automation.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#712

Post by shkkmo »

simonsarris wrote: post #141

"Basic Income that ends in 1/5/10 years" is not basic income at all. For some of the population they will literally be studying the effects of a temporary salary increase that follows a person if they change jobs. For some of the population they will be studying a don't-have-to-work sabbatical.

The article specifically addresses this:

"We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time.

But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc."

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#713

Post by shkkmo »

tomp wrote: post #12

> In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. This is omitting one crucial detail: for how long will the basic income last. At least for myself, my decisions would be completely different if I was to receive unconditional income for e.g. 10 years (or less), vs. for the rest of my life.

This is addressed in the article:

"We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time.

But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc."

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#714

Post by _rpd »

djrogers wrote: post #706

I've got a question for the BI fans that I haven't seen addressed before: The U.S. is a huge country, with wildly varying costs of living. Will a UBI be adjusted for regional costs, or will it be a simple flat rate? I can see problems with both options; with the former you'd encourage people to stay in (or move to) more costly regions, and with the latter you'd either be paying someone in Salina Kansas above the medi…

All the proposals that I have seen are flat rate, with people being positively encouraged to relocate to areas that are currently less expensive.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#715

Post by Schwolop »

keerthiko wrote: post #593
xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

The best solution I can think of to counter people blowing all their money is to trickle the money to an account, instead of giving it to them as a single fat paycheck every month. So if instead of giving them $1500/30days, give them $50 a day or maybe $25/day and a $750 "rent stipend" bulk at the end, so that they can't blow more than a certain amount a day unless they've been actively saving. This encourages the be…

If you've ever played "idle games" (e.g. bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/#) they've effectively taken this concept to the extreme. Everything is earned and paid for as a rate of $/second. This strongly encourages you to leave your system in a state of positive rate before letting it idle, else you'll return to a ruined society.

Back in the real world, I think people might have a better understanding of their finances if they could view their position as a continuous function rather than only seeing the discrete transactions as most of us currently do.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#716

Post by will_brown »

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

>what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money

New startup ideas:

1. Create a BI Credit Union: Like all CU's it will be owned by its members (the people on BI are the shareholders). The BICU will extend credit to these its members (who likely never had credit before) and because members are on BI, the loans/credit would all be pretty standard limiting the risk of default. Maybe members could even take a more active role in voting on approving individual loans of its members as opposed to Bank underwriters.

2. BI Death Insurance: Say you are one of the first recipients of this initial YC BI Project experiment which I believe lasts five years. You can pay a premium and in the instance you die before the end of the 5 years, x% of the remaining BI for the period will be distributed to your beneficiaries.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#717

Post by eli_gottlieb »

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

>But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed?

It always bottoms-out somewhere. You pick based on how often these emergencies or "emergencies" seem to happen, how many of them we have the budget to handle, and how likely it is that a certain number of so-called emergencies represent real emergencies.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#718

Post by xienze »

melvinmt wrote: post #6

> If the pilot goes well, we plan to follow up with the main study. If the pilot doesn’t go well, we’ll consider different approaches. Interesting. What are the metrics to determine the success or failure of the pilot?

I'll eat my shoe if they come up with any other result than "resounding success!" with a healthy dose of hand-waving around any negative issues. Basic Income seems to be The Next Great Liberal Cause and YC being a Valley firm, I've got a feeling they fall a bit towards the left part of the political spectrum.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#719

Post by kohanz »

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

> what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?

What if this happens to someone on welfare?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#720

Post by Tloewald »

colinplamondon wrote: post #67
xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help. That's where family and charity hopefully take over. At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing gua…

I suspect that the problem would not be huge (but it would need addressing). The key would be making accessing the emergency safety net sufficiently unpleasant/inconvenient as to dissuade casual fraud. (The welfare equivalent of being put on hold.)

The key questions in my mind are:

(a) how do we prevent people borrowing against it?

(b) what to do about kids of people who squander their basic entitlements, but it's not like the current system handles this issue well.

Post reply on HN