A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory • Hacker News Board

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#411

Post by jfoutz » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

cmdkeen wrote: post #379

TTPrograms wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation doesn't necessarily follow. If everyone was given a 10% raise then you would get inflation, but a fixed distribution results in a very different effect. One possibility is that people would purchase roughly the same amount with the lower classes having free time to educate themselves rather than working minimum wage jobs. I mean, I can't imagine somebody throwing their lives away just to buy another loaf of…

What incentive do they have to educate themselves? After all they currently had an incentive to educate themselves during their period of compulsory education yet still ended up working in a minimum wage job they value so little they'd quit if they were given a minimum wage. You don't see masses of low waged workers in countries with maximum working hours (and thus some leisure time) educating themselves.

The modern economy is hit driven. 1 J. K. Rowling pays for a lot of not J.K. Rowlings.

Individual's fortunes look a whole lot like a random walk. Some people, get over their crack addiction and become writers for the new york times, some people get over their wall street addiction and become crack smokers. It's tough to say where a particular person will be in 20 years. Before you start listing off titans of silicon valley, i'd like to point at all the super rich Vanderbilts running around.

It's up to us as a civilization to decide how low to make the floor. any benefit will have fraud. Straight up anarchy, you keep what you kill sounds rough. If that's your plan, i'm going to get together with my friends and stop you. Nobody works ever, also sounds dumb. I'm going to get together with some other friends and stop that too.

So, we pick a spot somewhere between the two extremes. Historically, value was created by people. More and more, value is created by machines. Cab drivers, sports writers and port masters are all on the way out.

I'm not at all sure how civilization works when only the top 10% or 1% of people are actually capable of being useful to the economy, regardless of level of training.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#412

Post by orangecat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:40 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #192

ed_blackburn wrote: post #187

Basic Income is sometimes dogmatically derided as 'socialist' thus evil. Proponents of Basic Income - or varieties thereof - can be found on the left and the right of the economic political compass. Even Milton Freedman was a proponent of some guise. Personally I think it is lazy to dismiss the thinking behind Basic Income as merely communism.

That's why I hate political labels. People say UBI is 'communist' because it's similar to one aspect of communism, and therefore must be bad because of all the other aspects of communism. It's a strong failure mode of human thinking.

The Worst Argument In The World: http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#413

Post by jdmichal » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:44 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #398

macspoofing wrote: post #364

The more I think about it, the more I really like the idea of a basic income. One of the great things about universal healthcare is that you just never worry about it. I never have to think about what would happen to myself or my spouse or my kids if they get cancer after I quit or lose my job. Whether my insurance will fight me on some treatment, or if it covers the rights things. It's nice. Basic income seems like…

The output side of BI is naturally attractive. Everybody gets money. How could that not be attractive? I'm just skeptical about how we would fund BI to a level that is meaningful while maintaining some modicum of equitability and equanimity. Just to lift everyone to the poverty line in the USA ($11,770) would require paying out more than $3 trillion in net benefits, or roughly the size of the entire federal budget to…

Poverty line for each household is $11770 + $4160 per person. Average persons per household is 2.58. So the average cost per household would be $18343.

There are 318.9 million people in the US. Divide by persons per household yields 123.6 million households.

Multiply the two: $2.267 trillion.

Of course, if this is how the math ends up going, there would be a huge incentive ($7610) for two persons to remain "individual households".

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#414

Post by ptaipale » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:46 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #223

DanBC wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP post was specifically about those lazy benefits claimants who don't study or do voluntary work to improve their chance of getting back to work. Parent post correctly points out that many of those claimants were prohibited - under threat of criminal prosecution - from doing those things while claiming some benefit.

Often benefits put you in a situation where it makes no economical sense to pursue a job. I have a friend who lost her mother and had a pension that would be taken away if she got employed, but the pension itself was much bigger than she could ever dream of earning at that time (hell, it was bigger than I was earning in my first two programming jobs). So there's your incentive to go and get employed. Or another examp…

Quite. I wouldn't call people "lazy" if they've fallen in a benefit trap. The benefits have been created with good intentions, but they have paved a road.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#415

Post by Tloewald » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

frogpelt wrote: post #362

The basic income concept is intriguing to me (because it simplifies things) but I do not think it will work for this reason: Who administers the basic income? The government and by extension politicians. Once they have every single person who breathes on the dole, this will give them unbelievable leverage against the people. If the government is giving everyone a check, how hard is it to argue that the check should b…

> Besides that, asking any government to take money from the people, run it through the giant bureaucracy machine, and magically produce a net benefit to the people is both logically impossible and naturally never going to happen.

So apparently the federal highway system isn't a net benefit? How about the internet?

Also in more direct terms, the government "magically" made profits by bailing out AIG, GM, and so on -- so we got taxpayer money (or printed money, doesn't matter) being used to create (a) more money than was used, and (b) the net benefit of not having the economy implode together with the more arguable net benefit of (c) GM staying in business.

As an aside: a friend of mine used to work as a transport economist, trying to figure out the net benefit of government projects. (This was in Australia, but Australian politics is every bit as borked and corrupt as American.) Typically the cut-off point for a government road project was a societal benefit / cost ratio of 20/1.

The thing about corporations -- they raid the societal common (the benefits of public education, civil order, roads, etc.) and make profits "themselves".

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#416

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:49 PM UTC

foota wrote: post #326

rorykoehler wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For basic goods there would be more demand (people who can't afford even basics would enter the market making the total market larger) in turn making it more attractive to compete there. People always go where there is opportunity. We are also on a long term trend of prices coming down in any case.

This is not how economics works. There are supply curves and there are demand curves, then there is the quantity supplied and quantity demanded. If the demand for a product shifts up (increases) due to basic income, then the quantity demanded increases. Then inventories of that product decrease, indicating that the firms could start producing more and still be able to sell it. They do this, but there costs go up, sin…

> assuming they are producing with increasing marginal costs, which is generally true

The norm is marginal production costs decreasing with scale. The usual exception to it is when those costs stay constant.

Unitary costs increasing with scale isn't unheard of, but it's also not common in any way.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#417

Post by orangecat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:49 PM UTC

toong wrote: post #239

Are there any studies out there about the second order effects ? If everyone is getting BI, I'm expecting rent to go up. Like, waaaaaaay up. Up to the point where no one can live from BI anymore.

Then the third order effect is that it becomes more profitable to supply housing, and rents come back down.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#418

Post by Noelkd » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #347

brobinson wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who owns the machines in that system? The government?

I don't care who owns them, as long as the value they produce is at least partially shared.

If you haven't read this[1] I think you might enjoy it. It covers the ideas you are talking about. I think it was featured on HN some time back.

[1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#419

Post by rconti » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

frogpelt wrote: post #362

The basic income concept is intriguing to me (because it simplifies things) but I do not think it will work for this reason: Who administers the basic income? The government and by extension politicians. Once they have every single person who breathes on the dole, this will give them unbelievable leverage against the people. If the government is giving everyone a check, how hard is it to argue that the check should b…

America will be about the last place to attempt this, if the past (and our current welfare) are any guide.

It's an interesting concept. My immediate reaction is that it creates disincentives to work. In theory it does, but the only data we have is those who are currently on welfare and do not work -- but maybe those people were basically not going to work anyway! We have no competing group of people who are on welfare yet still CHOOSE to work to better their lives, because as soon as someone gets a job, no more benefits! So it's natural that an outsize chunk of people on public assistance don't work -- and the ones who stay on the longest, of course, don't WANT to work. But it undercounts those who go on the system then back out of it as they get work.

Other things that seem "obvious" to result: inflation. If everyone can afford $x for housing, why should housing costs not go up by a similar amount? The same way 2 incomes is now "normal", and the same way giving tax deductions on mortgage interest to make housing "more affordable" means, now that everyone can afford more housing, housing is bid up.

I don't know, but it's a fascinating experiment, anyone who is not paying for it should be in favor of this experiment -- unless you just hate poor people.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#420

Post by CONTRARlAN » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

rconti wrote: post #419

frogpelt wrote: post #362

The basic income concept is intriguing to me (because it simplifies things) but I do not think it will work for this reason: Who administers the basic income? The government and by extension politicians. Once they have every single person who breathes on the dole, this will give them unbelievable leverage against the people. If the government is giving everyone a check, how hard is it to argue that the check should b…

America will be about the last place to attempt this, if the past (and our current welfare) are any guide. It's an interesting concept. My immediate reaction is that it creates disincentives to work. In theory it does, but the only data we have is those who are currently on welfare and do not work -- but maybe those people were basically not going to work anyway! We have no competing group of people who are on welfar…

> I don't know, but it's a fascinating experiment, anyone who is not paying for it should be in favor of this experiment -- unless you just hate poor people.

What a bizarre statement. It's really easy to read that as two things:

1. You're totally game to experiment, just so long as it's not your money. 2. Anyone who doesn't agree must hate poor people.

I'm pretty certain you didn't really mean either, but the net result of that sentence is awfully unproductive: "anyone who doesn't like this must either have skin in the game or hate poor people!"