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Request For Research: Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#341

Post by egypturnash »

lisper wrote: post #280
tptacek wrote: post #170

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…

> Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services. The limiting factor here is the regulatory regime, which makes it all but impossible to move money around without using a bank as an intermediary. That gives the banking cartel effective veto power on all new financial services. The key reform here is to separate the movem…

"Access to money transfer as a basic human right" is a brilliant way to reframe the conversation around financial services. I'm gonna start talking about transaction fees from that perspective now.

And yeah, good luck extracting the banks from the profit-making niches they've carved out in that process. They will fight that to their last breath.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#342

Post by chubot »

mosquito242 wrote: post #159
chubot wrote: post #46

My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income. That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that. In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this,…

My assumption about basic income was always that at it's core, it provides the money for food and shelter. This reduces bureaucratic overhead in terms of trying to provide people those goods, and gives them the freedom to make their own choices and not have to work to survive, and the government is no longer forced to create the infrastructure to try to find ways to provide food and shelter. This may, however, requir…

OK, well this is a good thing for YC to fund an experiment to test.

If given basic income, do people spend money on food and shelter, and plan out a good life, or do they live day-to-day and remain a burden on society?

This is why I think education, for example, comes before basic income. Without education, you can easily imagine people remaining homeless despite the income.

Of course some people will succeed and some won't -- the question is the ratio.

Some rich people are scrupulous; some rich people waste their money. I don't see any reason to believe that poor people are any different. I think we can still help those people with education, etc. without wasting taxpayer dollars. But how much would be "wasted" is of course an open question.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#343

Post by mattmaroon »

tptacek wrote: post #170

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…

The flipside to your first point is that employers can probably get an edge these days by simply ignoring college degrees. If you're skilled enough at hiring to actually find good people, ones without degrees are probably undervalued by a significant margin.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#344

Post by Natsu »

mrtron wrote: post #266

It isn't clear what we should optimize on. Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? The "idleness" seen in playing video games seems very close to most jobs. Many factory jobs have more mental idleness and less fulfillment than a video game.

Yes, working at a factory production line is utterly mind-numbing (I speak from experience) even if one is bored enough to use the spare brainpower to perform all sorts of microoptimizations, but at the end of the day, one provides people with goods and the other uses up electricity to provide entertainment, so the value to everyone else isn't the same.

And we do need to provide each other with value, or there won't be enough things to buy no matter how many dollars we have.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#345

Post by tptacek »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #331
tptacek wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am not talking about trade schools. The jobs staffed by trade school grads already do a decent job of not being beholden to university signaling. I'm talking about white collar professional jobs that rely on those signals for reasons having nothing to do with job aptitude.

What do you have in mind then? The for-profit university experiment has largely been a scammy failure.

I agree with that too. A big part of the reason for that outcome is that for-profit universities are pin-compatible with the university education system --- which, as noted upthread, is often really just a means for wealthy people to purchase status for their offspring --- which allows them to capture student loan subsidies, enabling them to bid prices up the same way universities do.

The alternative to college education isn't going to look like a college.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#346

Post by surfmike »

ThomPete wrote: post #312
tptacek wrote: post #170

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…

Problem is that a country like Denmark have all those things more or less and we still have more or less the same issues although to lesser degree. The solution to the problem isn't hiding in what we already know although many of these things of course would be hugely beneficial to people. The underlying problem. Technology is still going to be there.

I'd say the bottom 50% live much more prosperously in Denmark than in the US.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#347

Post by stcredzero »

tptacek wrote: post #170

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…

Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old.

Why not just free university education for people who have the prerequisite academic qualifications?

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#348

Post by corin_ »

clemensley wrote: post #202

Honestly, I don't think that people sitting around is the problem with basic income - it's funding it. Say you are going to give each of the 320M inhabitants of the US $10k per year (that's about the poverty threshold). That would be a cost of $3.2 Trillion per year, or about 50% the total government revenue (federal, state, & local combined). I just cannot see a future where the US raises taxes by a number that anyw…

Keep in mind that some of the additional tax would be funded by the basic income received by the rich (i.e. some people would get the $10k and then pay back $10k more in tax than they would have before, thus not gaining or losing - and of course some people will fall on either side of that middle line). Also, some social benefits costs would be cut, and in theory possibly also save money on currently-needed beaurocracy.

Whether it all balances out would depend on how it was implemented and then your subjective opinion of how it would work, my point is just that it's not as simple as "find another $3.2trillion".

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#349

Post by fasteddie »

Spooky23 wrote: post #120

The problem with basic income is that people need purpose, not charity. Look at the success of programs in Africa that give people the ability to make a living, not a bag of rice. One particularly moving story was about a group that got foot-powered water pumps into the hands of subsistence farmers, who subsequently were able to send their kids to school. At one point, the core purpose of monetary policy and central…

Evidence increasingly is showing that direct cash transfers to the poorest are among the most effective interventions, among randomized control trials in the developing world.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#350

Post by Retric »

xixi77 wrote: post #298
tptacek wrote: post #170

Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…

It's an interesting list... To me, improving provision of medical service and education definitely seems possible, as a lot of current problems are due to the fairly artificial constraints in the system. Removing them, or going around them, can really do a lot. Things like child care and finance are not as obvious to me though: these are already competitive industries, with very price-sensitive clients too, and (IMO)…

Childcare is dying for some automation. 1 person can care for ~3 very young children(Worse, these are all minimum numbers. You need extra staff to cover someone being sick, or turn people away.
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