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Basic Income Research Proposal

basicincome.ycr.org

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Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#391

Post by pferde »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #62
vasco wrote: post #28

I would speculate that any end date on this scenario will invalidate results. What a person does if it is guaranteed a job for life vs 5 years is wildly different, as you'll need to make sure when those 5 years are up, you'll be ready to enter the job market again, etc. I believe the same will happen with basic income. If we want to study where people gravitate to more fulfilling jobs, feel happier and so on, you nee…

Idea: what if they could hide from the recipients how long the program will take, while guaranteeing they'll get two years advance warning? Then for the first three years we might get something more representative of behavior on indefinite BI. I do realize that by this point this would be hard to hide.

Also, leaks would eventually happen. Someone always knows someone who knows...

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#392

Post by SXX »

pdfernhout wrote: post #380
afpx wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely disagree with you. I personally know two 2nd-generation 'trustfunders' who many would say don't do much. That is, they 'just' do leisure work. One plays poker part time, and he volunteers the rest of his time. The other promotes bands that she likes. But, are they really doing nothing of value? I think many people who meet them are sort of envious: seems like a nice life! I also know more than a fe…

I wish technically-inclined people who could live off their savings would work on FOSS communication tools (e.g. FreedomBox, MatterMost, Matrix.org, Smallest Federated Wiki, or similar) to create viable alternatives to the centralized profit-driven communication and search systems created by venture capitalism. Or do whatever other worthwhile FOSS floats your boat like for educational simulations or whatever to be pa…

Personally I don't believe in idea that many people would be able to build successful FOSS projects and communities around them while living off their savings. It's could be a good for the start, but nothing would work without project having viable business model like MatterMost or Discourse have. Or if someone sponsors it be it some corporation or individual.

Reason for this is simple: successful project it's not just the code, but also community around it. Coordinating even small team across different time zones, helping new contributors, reviewing the code and keeping it all together is exhausting daily job and not everyone can handle that. Now projects that you find valuable would require highly skilled programmer to work on them.

So the person it's require to build such software can easily find a job in one of corporations that pay very well or FOSS-related job that might have lesser pay. Why should someone prefer to live off savings or in debt just to build software that don't have business model?

This is the reason I don't think basic income would help here at all. Of course some could be okay in living just above poverty while working on project they believe in, but most would prefer job for some corporation that would have have 3-10 times better pay.

So instead of basic income there should be viable way to fund open source projects and to distribute the pay fairly according to the job done. For individuals and small teams there is already Patreon, but there no simple solution for distributed teams usual open source project have because it's extremely hard to collect and distribute the money without offending someone or contributors lose motivation to work on project when one guy is being paid while they get nothing. Unfortunately I don't even sure if ever will be solution for this.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#393

Post by alphydan »

amelius wrote: post #137
vasco wrote: post #28

I would speculate that any end date on this scenario will invalidate results. What a person does if it is guaranteed a job for life vs 5 years is wildly different, as you'll need to make sure when those 5 years are up, you'll be ready to enter the job market again, etc. I believe the same will happen with basic income. If we want to study where people gravitate to more fulfilling jobs, feel happier and so on, you nee…

Can't we just have lotteries that have lifelong basic income as prices? It would mean free research data.

We can and we do, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/us/florida-teen-wins-top-p... (following those outcomes would be great research indeed)

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#394

Post by fujiters »

majewsky wrote: post #312
CapsAdmin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes people will enjoy a 5 year vacation though. In Norway if you're chronically disabled you can apply for something that seems very similar to basic income. I'm in that system and in my experience most of the people I know in this system are bored. It could be because all their friends are working so it's difficult to meet new people, there's also that this system is for disabled people and people with ment…

> But most of my friends i met in this system ended up finding a job, despite being promised permanent "universal income". So this experience stands against one of the most common arguments against basic income, "nobody is going to work anymore". It validates my belief that people will still seek purpose (and monetary rewards) even when their basic needs are fulfilled. > I've heard this is to encourage people to work…

I feel like we already have tons of examples of people not really working for the money. CEOs of major companies typically have more than enough saved to just live indefinitely off the returns of that money. And yet, they don't.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#395

Post by christophilus »

majewsky wrote: post #312
CapsAdmin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes people will enjoy a 5 year vacation though. In Norway if you're chronically disabled you can apply for something that seems very similar to basic income. I'm in that system and in my experience most of the people I know in this system are bored. It could be because all their friends are working so it's difficult to meet new people, there's also that this system is for disabled people and people with ment…

> But most of my friends i met in this system ended up finding a job, despite being promised permanent "universal income". So this experience stands against one of the most common arguments against basic income, "nobody is going to work anymore". It validates my belief that people will still seek purpose (and monetary rewards) even when their basic needs are fulfilled. > I've heard this is to encourage people to work…

Yeah. Open source software also kind of demonstrates this. Solving problems and producing value for others is a powerful motivator in itself.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#396

Post by CapsAdmin »

hossbeast wrote: post #350
Frondo wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you would, and you know what? Good for you if you do. Just about everyone I know would start a business, volunteer, do creative things, contribute to making the world a better place. But, at the end of the day, I don't care how people spend their time or their money. If some fraction of the population wanted to bum around on their minimal UBI for the rest of their lives, fine by me. It's never going to lead to…

If you don't care at all, then why are you okay financing that situation with your taxes?

Even if you personally don't need or use the system today maybe it can be useful for you in the future.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#397

Post by hycaria »

awjr wrote: post #190

Many countries already have a form of age restricted UBI. The state pension. I know many pensioners in the UK that work as the state pension does not provide 'enough'.

Enough for what ? Eating ? Maintaining a family house that is not residence of your children anymore ? Having a car ? Covering additional health expenses ?

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#398

Post by CapsAdmin »

majewsky wrote: post #312
CapsAdmin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes people will enjoy a 5 year vacation though. In Norway if you're chronically disabled you can apply for something that seems very similar to basic income. I'm in that system and in my experience most of the people I know in this system are bored. It could be because all their friends are working so it's difficult to meet new people, there's also that this system is for disabled people and people with ment…

> But most of my friends i met in this system ended up finding a job, despite being promised permanent "universal income". So this experience stands against one of the most common arguments against basic income, "nobody is going to work anymore". It validates my belief that people will still seek purpose (and monetary rewards) even when their basic needs are fulfilled. > I've heard this is to encourage people to work…

While I'm hoping to see this system work I'm not sure if it will and whatnot. It's great to see research for it and maybe they can study some existing systems as well.

I feel a lot of people on here want to be or are already an entrepreneur. So of course your friends are most likely gonna start a business if they had the time, opportunity and safety net. But maybe that's enough?

Another thing I hear a lot from people in this system is saying they wish they had more money and wish they could do something to earn more. (But then again I think this is always the case)

The money we get is based on some average income. It's enough to pay the rent for an apartment, save up a little to buy a TV, maybe even a trip to another country if you're careful, etc.

I don't think it's enough to own a car, buy a house, have kids, etc. To live that kind of "dream" you need to find a full time job. Which sounds fair within the UBI context but maybe unfair if you're disabled. (I personally don't know, my own life is more than good at the moment)

I should have mentioned that there's a social stigma with not working (at least in Norway). Many of my disabled friends are not very open about it because they think it's embarrassing. I have one friend who choose to work at charity-ish place just so he can say he's working. He's 40 years old though and I believe the stigma was much stronger back in the past.

Personally if people ask what I'm doing I tell them that I'm disabled but I like programming, making music and so on. I've never had anyone react negatively to this, but this is face to face, first time we meet, and maybe the non disabled people I meet have similar mindset as me. (programmers, freelancers, artists, etc) The friends I have who are disabled is another friend circle entirely.

So I don't experience the stigma but I can imagine there are some people who don't like it of course. It's just that I don't hang around those people.

But this stigma could be an important factor as to why people want to work.

I feel like I'm talking for https://www.nav.no (the system in Norway I'm talking about). Maybe they have more useful (and more accurate) data for the people who research UBI.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#399

Post by ThomPete »

dang wrote: post #388
ThomPete wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it that because you haven't actually answered the question I asked you with regards to why people would choose that over technology. Keep in mind you are the one who claimed that we can just design things the way we want them, yet you haven't actually provided anything close to an argument here. That the gig-economy works for you is great, it's just not an actual argument and it's definitely not an argument ag…

This crosses into personal attack. You can't do that here, regardless of how wrong or annoying someone else's comment is, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly. Would you please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this?

I have been participating on HN for years never been accused of that before.

What exactly are you referring to?

Furthermore I can't fix anything as I can't edit.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#400

Post by pg314 »

taysic wrote: post #385
pg314 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Implemented on a national scale, cost inflation of basic consumer needs is a near certainty. How so? Is there are large number of consumers that are currently not able to satisfy their current basic needs? Otherwise aggregate demand will stay the same and on the supply side nothing changed, so there is no reason why prices would change.

Why do you think nothing would change on the supply side? There are plenty of low income workers that would quit their jobs, driving their wages up - thereby either driving up the cost of goods or reducing supply. Unless of course the goods are shipped from nonUBI countries

Good point, I hadn't considered those second order effects.

> There are plenty of low income workers that would quit their jobs, driving their wages up

I don't think we have enough information currently to unequivocally state that. How many low income workers would quit? It's not like many people in better paying jobs reduce their working hours up to a point where they make the equivalent amount of money as a UBI. How many currently unemployed people would be picking up the slack?

> thereby either driving up the cost of goods or reducing supply.

Labor costs are a small part of the price of basic goods. I couldn't find much good information, but e.g. [1] says that for fresh fruit and vegetables a 40% increase of labor costs amounts to a 4% increase for consumers.

[1] https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2005

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