Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult • Hacker News Board

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#351

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:15 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #213

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A can of coke can cost 6CHF at Zurich airport maybe, but the standard price is 2CHF, and even cheaper at some grocery stores. San Francisco is still much cheaper than Zurich in terms of expenses, only the rents are kind of comparable.

Medical expenses are presumably lower in Switzerland, college tuition at e.g. MIT for a person making $300k/yr vs. an ETH-Z student, and IIRC taxes on capital gains are lower in Switzerland than in NYC or California (due to state/local taxes). Consumer goods are definitely cheaper in the US.

Those mandated insurance premiums are not cheap unless you are a post doc, hehe. Swiss spends 10% GDP on healthcare, which is higher than most Western European countries though not as high as the USA, which is at about 17% now.

Income taxes are low, but you get reamed in the store for daily goods and food.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#352

Post by badass » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

A basic income only serves to maintain the status quo for those at the top. It's a release valve on political pressure to bring fundamental changes to the system to better serve the lower classes.

In the US, one can look how the Section 8 housing program serves a similar pressure-relief function in the housing rental market. By giving essentially free rent to those who cannot afford current market rate rents, it relieves political pressure to reform housing policies that keep rental rates high while also inflating rents and property values, heavily distorting the rental market. I think one can easily view the Section 8 program more as welfare program benefiting property owners rather than lower class renters.

A basic income would have a similar effect on the general cost of living, inflating values and benefiting the wealthy. Again, like the Section 8 program, this will be a welfare program benefiting the wealthy because this basic wage will simply flow upward and concentrate at the highest economic rungs.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#353

Post by toomuchtodo » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

gcb1 wrote: post #345

marknutter wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it differently. If people are receiving a basic income their performance at a job becomes much less important. Why care if you do a good job if losing it doesn't really impact you that negatively?

hn commenter on job satisfaction threads: I'm motivated by challenges and working with similar minded people, not money. hn commenter on minimum wage threads: everyone work for minimal sustenance.

hn commenters: Look at all the world problems us tech folks can solve!

bay area employees: Look how good we are at pushing ads on people!

If you're less concerned about supporting yourself, you can spend time on problems that are important but aren't profitable.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#354

Post by prostoalex » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:18 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #140

konstruktor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the main questions about something like this is about who would do boring, low-paid work with this sort of basic income. I think that with basic income, this question would not make sense, and that's exactly the reason that I like the idea so much. The reason why people do boring, dirty and dangerous work for little money is that there are folks who have no skills that would enable them to get a more fulfill…

It could also act as a strong incentive for developing automatic and robotic solutions to these needs.

Oil-rich countries that do provide an equivalent of basic income for its citizens (Saudi Arabia, UAE) do not seem to have a thriving robotics startup community, but do have a wave of temporary foreign workers living in nasty conditions

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#355

Post by wpietri » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #299

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the main questions about something like this is about who would do boring, low-paid work with this sort of basic income. I believe this would not be a problem in the long run for the following reasons: - A lot of boring low-pay work is unnecessary (dealing with the endless paper trail of over-complicated bureaucracies, lots of things that companies do, like telemarketing, just because it's so cheap, etc. etc…

I see it differently. If people are receiving a basic income their performance at a job becomes much less important. Why care if you do a good job if losing it doesn't really impact you that negatively?

In two words: Maslow's hierarchy. [1]

The best places I know have people who are working from higher-layer motivations, and corporate cultures that encourage that by treating people as adults, supporting them, giving them wide latitude to get things done, et cetera.

The worse are the opposite. The people there are desperate for money to survive. The corporate cultures are disempowering, controlling, contemptuous.

It's commonly thought in the US that these are just two different sorts of people, the high-class creatives who should be given latitude, and the low-class proles who must be controlled like surly teens if they are to get anything done.

But that's not true. For example, Toyota's great success comes mainly from treating factory workers with deep respect. [2] And it works here, too. This American Life tells the story [3] of Toyota turning GM's worst plant into one of the best. Same people, just a different culture.

So if people are receiving a basic income, jobs will have to shift toward the model that motivates people through the higher end of Maslow's hierarchy. Money will be part of why people show up, but it would not longer be the only reason.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs [2] Liker's Toyota Kata is a great book on this. [3] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#356

Post by prostoalex » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:20 PM UTC

fab13n wrote: post #175

tikhonj wrote: post #2

A Swiss franc is currently worth a little bit more than a dollar, so this works out to $2800/month or $33600/year. By US standards, this actually seems to be a good salary: significantly better than working full time at minimum wage. It would cover all my current expenses handily. Of course, I'm young and single but by no means frugal. (I find that the little costs involved in worrying about my expenses easily outwei…

About poorly paid boring jobs: either they're socially necessary and will command higher wages, or they're not worth it, and we'll manage without them. The main interest of minimal income is to shift the power balance between employer and employees: today, most employees have a choice between complying and starving. Actually in many countries they have to do both. With minimal income, it becomes a choice between comp…

> today, most employees have a choice between complying and starving

Really? What's the grand total number of starvation deaths in United States or Switzerland?

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#357

Post by urish » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:23 PM UTC

danbmil99 wrote: post #336

summerdown2 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A system like this will need to be very well monitored, it can help immensely to those in need, but if done unconditionally it will certainly encourage laziness in a sector of the society. Thought experiment: If the overall effect of basic income is to make things better overall(1), does it really matter if some people become lazy? (1) Through whatever metric you want to measure. ... To give some background, my que…

This assumes a static proportion of "lazy" or unethical people. I think the counterargument is one of moral hazard: if you reward laziness, more and more people will decide to be lazy. There is also a motivational issue -- many people (I suspect) will find it harder to work for a living if they sense that their hard-earned money is taxed and given away to freeloaders.

But why would you equate "lazy" with unethical?

That's already an assumption that could be challenged. We now don't deem someone who's unwilling to work from sun up to sun down in the rice fields as lazy or unethical, but 300 years ago that might have been the case. Why? Because now a few people grow our food so efficiently that most people can afford to be "lazy" and work 40 hours a week in an office job, or at least an air-conditioned job.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#358

Post by ricardobeat » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:32 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #312

samatman wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's presume you have a job, rather than being freelance or a founder: Would you continue to do well at it if it was, say, 60% of your income rather than all of it?

I think that the less the job income affected my bottom line, the less I would care about performing well at it. If it was 10% of my income I would care even less. After all, I'd rather be working on my own ideas than someone else's.

If you are a freelancer doing one job a month, each one accounts for less than 10% of your income. Where do you draw the line? Do you do a shitty job for a few of them?

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#359

Post by malyk » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

xavi wrote: post #303

lmartel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frickin' everyone would. If someone offered you 30k/year basic income would you quit your cushy programming job, or would you buy more stuff?

Frickin' everyone? I look at the evolution of unemployment rates ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unemployment_rate_United_s... ) and I see a clear trend that I think is not going to change. Besides, among the employed, I'm quite sure that an important percentage of people don't like their jobs. And, to answer your question, I would probably quit a "cushy" programming job to pursue my projects and interests.

Isn't that exactly what proponents of basic income hope will happen? People will be free from the shackles of employment and will be free to pursue their own ideas and interests?

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#360

Post by gaius » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 5:37 PM UTC

pgeorgi wrote: post #340

powertower wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USSR. Millions lost.

USA's New Deal: potentially millions saved from starvation. That's the problem with those comparisons: it's easy to point at the precise body count of radical experiments that went the wrong way, but quite hard to enumerate the lives saved due to those that worked out. Kind of survivorship bias in reverse. I'd guess the establishment and enforcement of sanitary standards (which, at the beginning, was considered quite…

You can't know how it's going to play out or it's not an experiment...