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Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#741

Post by RangerScience »

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…

Add a way to restrict your own purchasing. Rather than have the social program give you X money for food and Y for rent, you get BI, and then you can assign X to food and Y for rent /yourself/, so that your card (because it'll probably be a card) rejects purchases that don't fit your self-assigned allotments.

Heck, that might even work for normal people who want a better way to handle their money. Does that exist yet?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#742

Post by waskosky »

dmoy wrote: post #729
kcorbitt wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal idea of a solution is to make basic income a "stream" of income instead of a lump sum once or twice a month. We have the technology to make a transfer happen hourly, or even minute by minute. By apportioning the income in that way it becomes impossible to "blow all [your] money" to the point where you can't afford food, because if you just wait half an hour or whatever you'll have enough on your card agai…

There is a problem with that though. For instance, if you're on foodstamps right now, and gas is not cheap, or it's very time-expensive to make it to the grocery store too often, then you're making single large trips. A continuous stream doesn't gel as well with that situation. You'd need a more comprehensive solution, like getting rid of food deserts in poor areas. Or at least, if you're going to do this, you'd have…

To solve many corner cases, you could maybe have a kind of voucher application at the grocery stores, gas stations, car mechanics, etc., which would provide a temporary advance (or just money from a designated separate emergency or unusual circumstance pool so that it isn't like a credit card) which would need various rules that would guarantee that the service provider would always see the money, but also ensure that the applicant would be registered and held legally liable for misuse of the voucher system.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#743

Post by kcorbitt »

seanc wrote: post #737
kcorbitt wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal idea of a solution is to make basic income a "stream" of income instead of a lump sum once or twice a month. We have the technology to make a transfer happen hourly, or even minute by minute. By apportioning the income in that way it becomes impossible to "blow all [your] money" to the point where you can't afford food, because if you just wait half an hour or whatever you'll have enough on your card agai…

Plenty of people would just borrow against their BI stream, effectively blowing it all at once.

Yeah I wanted to address this in my comment above but didn't want to get down in the weeds. There's a couple decent solutions to this problem. The liberal/socialist approach would be to make a contract garnishing future basic income illegal. The libertarian approach would be to make bankrupcy laws so frictionless that you could declare bankrupcy three times a week without breaking a sweat, causing payday loan companies to stop offering their services to the least financially responsible sector of the population.

I think either of these solutions could be made to work in general. Certainly better than what we have right now.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#744

Post by RangerScience »

kcorbitt wrote: post #727
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…

My personal idea of a solution is to make basic income a "stream" of income instead of a lump sum once or twice a month. We have the technology to make a transfer happen hourly, or even minute by minute. By apportioning the income in that way it becomes impossible to "blow all [your] money" to the point where you can't afford food, because if you just wait half an hour or whatever you'll have enough on your card agai…

There's a fascinating idea presented in a webcomic (that I totally cannot find right now) that really explores this idea.

Aside from what all else is going on in the society, everybody has a banked amount of money that is their steady-state; that amount is pegged to living costs (either civ wide, or locally, I don't remember, probably something in between). If you currently have less than that amount, your account gradually fills - if you current have more, it drains. I also don't remember if the rates are fixed, or are curved (further from baseline, higher the fill/drain rate is).

Time-based costs and payments - rent, salary - are then taken as a rate, while one-off payments (meals, events, items) are paid for normally.

The goal of the system is a more matured BI situation, /plus/ an incentive structure to keep producing. If you make a shit ton of money off something, it'll last for some amount of time, but you will have to eventually re-contribute to society in order to maintain the "rich" standard of living.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#746

Post by tmnvix »

MicroBerto wrote: post #623
senseless wrote: post #253

Good to see steps like this being made! As a slight aside, there are strong proponents who argue, based on Ricardo's law of rent [0], that any excess income above the basic subsistence level will inevitably be swallowed up by landlords in the form of rents. I'd be very interested to hear from the folks involved in this study if they have an opinion on such an assertion, and if you have any ideas on addressing that ef…

I've brought this up in the past, and am always met with arguments that just don't seem to dent the problem statement. My simple question I always pose is this: "If everyone has $X dollars, then wouldn't $X become worthless?" I fail to see how there won't be some kind of inflationary situation amongst the lower class, especially in the form of rents over the course of a year as leases reset. I also refuse to accept a…

> "If everyone has $X dollars, then wouldn't $X become worthless?"

No.

You are ignoring the fact that this is in effect a redistribution of wealth.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#747

Post by louprado »

Since BI often discussed in the context of ML taking away jobs, why not perform this study on Uber drivers.

As someone who walks by Uber's new Oakland HQ regularly, it is always covered in anti-tech graffiti. Uber might gladly fund part of the research for PR reasons alone.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#748

Post by Jemaclus »

BraveNewCurency wrote: post #641
Jemaclus wrote: post #120

There's a lot of skepticism about basic income, especially when it comes to how does it save money? The top comment as of this writing is questioning it: > 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 safet…

> I'm not an economist, and I don't know the ins and outs of basic income, but that one throwaway page in The Expanse made me think a lot about what I think basic income should look like... and I don't think it should look like a monthly check. 1) If Basic Income is doled out slowly (say every week or every day as a credit card), then it's nearly impossible for someone to die from starvation. Should we also take away…

Gonna have to disagree with you. I think your view is a bit pessimistic.

> Who gets to decide what level of shelter is "good enough for basic"? Who decides what quality of t-shirt is "good enough"? Who decides which level of Ramen is "good enough"?

> No offense, but the idea in your book sounds a lot closer to "prison" than Basic Income.

You don't have a choice in prison. In prison, you eat what they feed you, live where they tell you, wear what they give you, and if you don't want those, then you get nothing at all.

You DO have a choice in this "basic" world. In a "basic" world, you get those things no matter what. The government picks it, sure, but they say "This is what you get at a minimum. If you want more, here's a path to contribute to society, and society will compensate you with money, and you can use that money to buy nicer stuff."

It's not an either/or proposition. It's both.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#749

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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?

They still get the BI check every week which they can still use to buy food and pay the rent, so homelessness or starvation doesn't happen. Now they may have some other bills they can't pay, so their cable gets turned off and they lose their car and have to buy a fifteen year old one or carpool or take the bus.

I mean what happens now in that case? If wrap your car around a pole and don't have collision insurance the government isn't going to buy you a new car. If you rack up gambling debts the only thing Uncle Sam will give you is a ticket to bankruptcy court.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#750

Post by bkmrkr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #749
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? They still get the BI check every week which they can still use to buy food and pay the rent, so homelessness or starvation doesn't happen. Now they may have some other bills they can't pay, so their cable gets turned off…

What if they borrow against that check and pledge next 10 years of payments?
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