A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste [1]. In fact, it is normal that as our society gets more educated and the supply of unskilled workers goes down, a lot of hard manual labor will become expensive. This is already the case with mining, for example. The fact that we software engineers do a job that we like and is well paid at the same time is a very lucky (for us) historical accident.

On the other hand, I see in basic income an opportunity to also do unalienated work. For example, I'd very happily use BI to take buy some time off and to do a kinda "libre software retreat", hacking on free projects for a while without needing to bargain with an employer that owns everything that comes out of my head.

[1] Excluding the cost of education, let's assume university is free as in a few places in Europe.

Take for instance the amount spent on the bank bailouts, which were supposedly done to help stimulate the economy. If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody a check for somewhere around 20K (the number is debatable).

Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the last few decades. That's another 20K or so per man, woman, and child. The national debt is closing in on 20T. Would you rather have a balanced budget and a check for 100K? (I understand the math is way fuzzy here. It's to make a point.)

We're reaching the point where the average person who supports helping the poor can figure out that we could have just set up an endowment for each poor person when they were born and spent less money than this. And at the same time we would get rid of a lot of folks doing useless overhead simply because the system is so complex.

For those reasons and more I like the UBI idea.

But ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. We need about a thousand different experiments -- ran for 10 or 20 years -- before we can begin to start saying what might work or not work. When I look at other charitable causes (aid to Africa comes to mind first), the rhetoric got way out ahead of the actual results for many, many decades. Tons of time, effort, and money were spent on strategies that didn't work but sounded pretty cool. We'd be idiots not to recognize that this is the danger here too.

The first question we have to ask is this: What is UBI? Is it a reliable income in place of a bunch of other services? Or is it in addition to a bunch of other services? The difference matters. Once that's defined, I sure would like to see if a majority of people doing nothing "rubs off" on ambitious, driven people. Or maybe it works the other way around. Maybe a small percentage of ambitious, driven people, in a society without external pressures, can persuade more and more folks to find meaning in helping others. Beats me. Sure will be fun to learn more.

Slogans are great. Results are better.

In most developed EU countries, a "social" income is given to unemployed people. In Belgium, it varies between 550€/month and 850€/month, depending on the situation. People lose this income as soon as they start to work, that means that a part-time job with an income of about 1000€/month is really unattractive. With a basic income, unemployed workers could be stimulated to accept this kind of low-pay jobs, as the pay will add up to their basic income.

With the increase of productivity we got in the last 50 years, the hours worked by low-skilled workers must be lowered, or we will face endlessly increasing unemployment rates. An universal basic income can stimulate this.

This is really why I want this to happen on a large enough scale to see if it really works or not.