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

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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm sure you could find that missing £85bn down the back of a sofa in whitehall. Sorry, but the whole idea is laughable. Not to mention the fact that it's another incentive to have more children and bigger families because the state will give you more money.

> it's another incentive to have more children and bigger families Should be easy to back that wild claim up with statistics. Can you?

Statistics have nothing to do with it. Either the incentive exists, or it doesn't. Ask for a citation/study/logical-argument on that, not statistics.

But bear in mind: Statistics could indicate the extent that the incentive is having on the incentivized population group, if at all.

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

#402
post #88

Basic income is a nice theory, but completely ignores the financing part. The money has to come from somewhere. I would be really fine with receiving a basic income. From the social side I would support it. People can do what they like, like artists, developers, and creative people. May be there will be the next business opportunity, startup from that work. Yes, may be other people are lazy, that is like today. There…

Money isn't a "thing". It's not something tangible that gets printed or mined. Money is a representation of what humans value, relative to each other. Having lots of money is like having lots of momentum.

When monetary systems break down, for reasons such as a lack of liquidity, people fall back to the barter system. I'll give you a sack of potatoes for your hours of legal services. We're still playing the same game, but the "Monopoly Bank" ran out of paper, so we're using IOUs and direct asset exchange.

Being poor is just a state where the person lacks liquidity. Bank bailouts were enacted to "rehydrate" banks. Basic income is the bailout idea extended to the individual level.

Currencies are only valuable to you for 2 reasons: there's a finite amount, and other people value it (because they can also trade it for stuff). There's no finite amount of currency that satisfies a person; people can sense the total quantity of currency and want a fraction of this; this is why "printing money" or otherwise increasing the total pool of a currency causes inflation.

If Basic Income has a tax or other system to remove equal amounts currency from the pool, then the system might work; you would be transferring value from Producers to Consumers, much like many social programs do today.

But if there is no tax or other mechanism to remove currency from the pool, Basic Income will just create massive inflation, as the total amount of currency gets bigger, each piece of currency just becomes less valuable.

Basic Income isn't a different game. This is still the same economics. We're just adding another input to the system, everything still flows in, around, and out the same. Many poor people lack liquidity, but why they lack liquidity is because they lack something that other humans value more than their own money or assets.

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

#403
post #372

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…

Cutting all the programs needed to enable basic income would mean most public servants would lose their jobs.

At which point they could go on basic income.

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

#404

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…

What if it was per family-ish. Then it'd only be about military exp size

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

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's evidence on a national scale that birthrate is anticorrelated with wealth. The better off people are on average, the less kids they have.

is it a smooth relationship, or is it more of a step function with 1 steps? I always suspected that the reality was more like "people who are able to afford children and able to make long-term plans tend to have only as many children as they want, when they feel they are ready, but people who aren't able to afford children or who don't make long-term plans will tend to take a more devil-may-care attitude towards proc…

Across countries this is a very noisy cloud of points where, if you go out and calculate a regression it's pointing down. Like every other social variable.

Since population explosion has felt out of fashion, there's a long time that I didn't see such plot. But what I've seen has a much clearer tendency than most social correlations people use at real decisions. It's about as clear as most correlations of quality of life with GDP.

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

#406
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less bombs, more bread.

How did not spending on defense work out for France and Poland?

Worked out pretty well for Costa Rica.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/15/opinion/la-oe-barash...

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What if it was per family-ish. Then it'd only be about military exp size

For poverty line, on a family basis, the incremental cost of another person approaches $5k (compared to $11.7k) so taking families into account the lower bound of payments is $1.5-2 trillion (if all we had were really big families)

http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/15poverty.cfm

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

#408
post #348
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wager there will be people who will take advantage of the system and use it as a opportunity to not work and laze around all day however those people will be the one who are not particularly productive in their work anyway. They might find something else to do they might not but that's OK it is an acceptable loss. On the other end companies which used to take advantage of the job market and the fact that ever…

How will you deal with inflation? Wouldn't the sudden influx of many cause the price for basic goods, rent etc to go up?

Peg the basic income to the Consumer Price Index or MIT's BPP [ http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ ]

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

#409

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…

Yes, we understand the libertarian argument. We've had it shoved down our throats for years now.

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

#410
post #372

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…

Cutting all the programs needed to enable basic income would mean most public servants would lose their jobs.

that's not a bad thing. reduces costs, reduces HR overhead, etc.
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