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A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

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Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#271
post #92

The Fed engineers a slow inflation every year via interest rate control and gives the benefit of the newly created money to banks, the loan borrowers, and asset holders as rates lower than keeping inflation at zero. Since the money supply increases anyway, might as well give the new money as basic income to ALL people. At least the money will be spent directly by the people for economic activities, instead of indirec…

Regarding inflation... if everyone instantly has $X now, doesn't $X become worthless? For instance, why would landlords not raise rents knowing that everyone now has this cash?

[deleted]

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#272
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase that XKCD comic, "14 benefit programs?! Ridiculous! We need to create one universal benefit program that covers everyone! Now you have 15 programs." I get the sense that liberals and conservatives have wildly different conceptions of what a Basic Income would mean in practice. Conservatives and libertarians may like the idea of giving a single no-strings-attached check every month to everyone and anyone…

"universal benefit program" meaning it is designed from the beginning to replace the 14, so now you have 1.

Designed to /= actually will

There are plenty of campaigners on the left - the UK Green Party is an example - that openly campaign for a BI in addition to most of the state benefits that already exist. And when it comes to implementation details, it's quite hard to believe that many left wing proponents actually would take the "well if the BI isn't enough for you to afford your social housing once we sell it off, maybe you should just move" route.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just wealthier people who will be worse off - it's everyone. Basic income is known to create a large disincentive for work. In previous experiments (Mincome) labor supply dropped by about 10% - double what happened during the great recession. This means that fewer working mothers can find child care, fewer laborers to mow your lawn, fewer nurses, fewer teachers, etc. No matter how much money you give to peop…

Funny thing happens when labor supply drops...prices for labor go up. In this case, the market would determine how much they'd need to go up by to get enough people doing things to meet demand. It may be more than many want to pay, but such is life.

a huge amount of work today is done by people instead of machines because people are cheaper than machines. If you make people more expensive than machines, the machines will do the work, and the people can stick to doing something they actually want to do (like playing with their kids, working on a hobby, or exploring the world)

Look at the response to a higher minimum wage - McDonalds, which typically runs a store with 8 to 10 people at $7/hour discovered that most of those jobs could be automated (with better results) for the capital expenditure equivalent of less than $15/hour. So now there are McDonalds stores that run with 2 people instead of 10. People still get their hamburgers, but now orders are taken by a computer screen, hamburgers are assembled by a machine instead of a person, etc.

Lawnmowers, street sweepers, taxi cabs, factory lines, farms can all be nearly fully automated these days, but it's cheaper to put a person there right now.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#274
Surely $833 a month ($10,000 a year) still wouldn't be even close to enough for someone who is unemployed to live? Wouldn't rent and bills use that up, without leaving anything for food, clothing etc? I love the idea of universal basic income, but I feel it would need to be double the amount proposed in this article to really change society for the better. Otherwise people will still need to resort to crime to extra money, seeing as there are going to be even less jobs in the future.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#275
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have been arguing against basic income for years now, and with some really good points[1], but I think you consistently miss the main attraction of the idea to the HN crowd. Many here believe that if people weren't forced to work for income, they would be doing things that are more valuable but also more difficult to monetize (at least initially but perhaps generally), like open source development. There is an un…

Can you do a back of the envelope calculation to figure out how large those "more valuable but also more difficult to monetize" effects would be? As I noted in the blog post you cited, most of this discussion is just meaningless verbiage. No one even attempts to quantify the the effects they claim are so important. (In the HN comments on that post, many people suggested such effects; the minute you crunch numbers the…

No one even attempts to quantify the the effects they claim are so important.

Perhaps I didn't phrase that strongly enough but growing the economy or making it more efficient is not the point. It's at most a rationalization.

go live in a rural area, consume very little, and survive with bad internet

That's not a realistic advice. It's extremely difficult, puts having a family largely out of reach, and places you away from potential collaborators. Even Joey Hess[1][2] has to resort to crowd funding and grants.

[1] https://joeyh.name/

[2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#276
post #99

This article says it's talking about a universal basic income, and makes the usual point that a completely universal, no-strings-attached income is simple to administer, doesn't have poverty traps, etc. And then, towards the end where it starts looking at numbers, it starts saying things like > But by excluding 45 million retirees who already receive a basic income through Social Security, the cost falls to $2.7 tril…

The only way I can see UBI working is if most people get no benefit. So someone making the average US income of $50,000/yr would get a check for $20k from the government and then see their taxes go up by ~$20k. Rich people would pay much more, effectively transferring their wealth to the poor. People who are solidly middle class wouldn't see much change, except having a new class of potential customers (the people that used to be poor).

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just wealthier people who will be worse off - it's everyone. Basic income is known to create a large disincentive for work. In previous experiments (Mincome) labor supply dropped by about 10% - double what happened during the great recession. This means that fewer working mothers can find child care, fewer laborers to mow your lawn, fewer nurses, fewer teachers, etc. No matter how much money you give to peop…

> fewer working mothers can find child care, fewer laborers to mow your lawn, fewer nurses, fewer teachers, etc. First of all, even if the people in positions like this were only working for sustenance and UBI provides it for them, it doesn't mean some wouldn't want to continue working to make even MORE money. UBI is a baseline, not welfare. If previously a lawn mowing job was only enough for rent and food, maybe now…

Your arguments are interesting, but they hold only in systems with artificial inflation controls. UBI increases the amount of money in the economy, which has the same effect as simply printing more, thus the value (scarcity) of the money decreases. A poor mother without UBI will be a poor mother with UBI because costs will simply go up, something you acknowledge.

As costs for services go up, costs of products go up as well. For example, if I'm in the beer business, and the cost for me to bottle a single beer is $.10 per bottle on my assembly line. If labor costs increase under UBI to double that ($.20/per bottle) (because cheap labor is now harder to find), I must increase my sale price by at least the same or go out of business.

Now somebody buying my beer has to pay $.60 more per six-pack, potentially wiping out that fraction of new income UBI was providing them.

The government could come in and say "the price of beer may not increase at all" and set some kind of price control. So now I need to cut $.60 of cost somewhere else in my product.

But wait, it gets worse!

Bottling isn't the only cost for me to make and sell my beer.

- Grain harvest is more expensive - increasing my cost

- Transport costs are more expensive - increasing my cost

- Blank bottles are more expensive - increasing my cost

- Brewing is more expensive - increasing my cost

and so on...

So to prevent inflation I have to cut costs everywhere else. Cheaper glass, worse grain quality, worse brewing methods, worse water supply, and so on. If I can't balance the cost equation I simply go out of business, decreasing the supply of products in the economy and increasing unemployment.

In effect, nobody gets paid more because everybody gets paid more, which drives up prices, which is the definition of inflation. If inflation is artificially capped by price controls, then product quality either goes down, or I go out of business.

It's basic economics.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#278
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10k? That's almost the average income (or more, depending on how you count taxes) of the Czech Republic. If I had to choose between living in a 2nd world country and working and living in a 1st world country and not working for the same money, guess which I'd choose?

Prices would be much higher here. I imagine your $10k goes much further in Czech

Rent is a bit higher and restaurants are tad more expensive. Otherwise no.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#279

In the early 1970s, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a "mouse utopia" to see what would happen if he created the perfect world for mice, with unlimited food, starting with four males and four females, that could reach a population of 2500. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM What happened next is absolutely astonishing. When the mice had nothing to do and nothing to work for, their society collapsed upon…

>I'd rather see unproductive humans digging and re-filling holes in the ground than getting paid to do nothing. Or something like the biking experiment in Black Mirror.

I'd rather people get paid to do nothing than people getting paid to do pointless tasks. I've seen some amazing things people made in their spare time, but I can't imagine anyone making something worthwhile digging and re-filling holes.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that would actually be the case, but if it were, the question would be: is it actually a bad 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,…

"I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste" That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is. Many attempts have been made to switch from the market to something else, not many were brilliant. The "lucky historical accident" you cite isn't one... It's just the way our society was built. Also you could argue on many differ…

>The "lucky historical accident" you cite isn't one... It's just the way our society was built.

The point is that you couldn't have been a software engineer if you'd been born 100 years ago. And demand for software engineers might tank in the future. People who currently enjoy their jobs as software engineers are lucky to be living in a time when it's possible to make a good living doing that. If you'd been born in another time, there might not have been such a good match between what you're good at, what you enjoy, and what's profitable.

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