Moving Forward on Basic Income • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#591

Post by zanny » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #466

Genuine question. Why do you feel we should keep useless people alive?

Because you and I are likely to become useless. If we are not capital owners, who do not have the means to survive exclusively off the value of our assets, then we will become useless to the economy in this century.

We already do not send people to prison for unpaid debts. And it is not a genocide we could easily see through - the unemployable, a number growing daily through automation, will not just sit down and die, but likely burn all of society down around with them if abandoned by said society.

This isn't some isolated fragment of the population. This decade, its going to be 11 million US citizens associated with the trucking and transport industries. In the decade following, service jobs, office jobs, actuarial, law, and medical jobs will all be going to AI neural nets and robotics with realized vision. And if we ignore how they contributed to the economic engine that produced such abundance, and let them starve while the owners of the means of production reap near infinite supply, that would realize our current extinction event to its fullest.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#592

Post by jjtheblunt » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

acgourley wrote: post #123

colinplamondon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help. That's where family and charity hopefully take over. At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing gua…

You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger. The liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size. As an aside, if you pay attent…

I read your "personally" sentence and immediately thought "this person has not lived in chicagoland where purposeful manipulation of such a system has famously been an artform".

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#593

Post by keerthiko » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

The best solution I can think of to counter people blowing all their money is to trickle the money to an account, instead of giving it to them as a single fat paycheck every month. So if instead of giving them $1500/30days, give them $50 a day or maybe $25/day and a $750 "rent stipend" bulk at the end, so that they can't blow more than a certain amount a day unless they've been actively saving. This encourages the behavior of saving which is the biggest missing skill for the poor (because they are not used to having anything to save).

As for what happens when that gets blown out because of an emergency, I think addressing the cost of health care in a place like America is an independent and arguably more important challenge than providing BI. The system built around insurance policies and over-priced hospital procedures is ridiculous to say the least. You shouldn't need insurance to afford simple checkups, prescriptions and treatment, which would prevent most overcomplicated health conditions for the financially constrained.

Every other financial emergency I believe can be responded to with "tough shit you've exhausted your social safety nets," and it's probably ok. BI won't solve everything (or even anything) magically overnight, the intent is to build a culture long-term where people manage their lives around it and don't have to be told "tough shit" from birth.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#594

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

[deleted]

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#595

Post by someguydave » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #584

I find it very naive to assume that basic income will be implemented as a simple, straightforward, clean replacement of our current welfare systems. Our current, messy, complicated, unsuccessful welfare systems is the result of many powerful political, social, and moral tendencies and forces, which will reshape basic income in the same way they shaped the welfare system in the first place. There will be many attempts…

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/arnold_kling_on_1.h...

Arnold Kling's opined on this point (the particular distortion of the US political process) in his interview with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast:

Kling: Well, let me make another point before I get back to that. Which is a point I also make in the book. Which is that, it isn't that the political process kind of just makes random errors. I think it actually makes very systematic errors. What it does is it always seems to work in the direction of subsidizing demand for something and restricting supply for that same thing.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#596

Post by skoocda » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

librvf wrote: post #564

It seems to me that a limited, 5-year Basic Income experiment is fundamentally flawed and will, at best, fail to predict anything important about what system-wide BI would have on society and at worst will be disastrously misleading and have an incredibly adverse effect on public policy. What I'm reading scares me. Oakland is a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and consi…

There needs to be some sort of action, though. Pondering all the possible effects has been going on for some time now, and simulating a perfectly spherical BI in a vacuum is not going to be any more useful than a 'fundamentally flawed' empirical experiment.

>What kind of science is this?

It's the normal scientific method. They have a hypothesis. They're going to test it in the real world. And the results will be analyzed. What's the alternative? If the pilot doesn't go well, and they take the same approach again, that'd be the very definition of insane.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#597

Post by joelmichael » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

martin_bech wrote: post #542

We basically already have Basic Income in Denmark. We have "kontanthjælp" which in practise everyone, without an income qualifies for. Kontanthjælp pays 2.181 USD a month, and on top of that you can get help with rent etc.

If only people without an income qualify, then it is not Basic Income. Basic Income is received by everyone without any means test. The purpose is to avoid perverse incentives in which people on welfare see little value in getting a job.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#598

Post by _zeo8 » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

Pay daily instead of monthly. This way it is harder to "blow all their money" and not being able to afford food. Or a hybrid approach: 50% of the monthly income upfront and the other 50% distributed daily.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#599

Post by hackuser » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

colinplamondon wrote: post #67

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help. That's where family and charity hopefully take over. At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing gua…

> I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit"

So the more vulnerable you are, the more likely the system should fail? A critical system is poorly designed when it is more likely to fail when its function becomes more critical.

Most people don't have problems because they are lazy, but because they have serious problems. Consider people with mental health issues, costly diseases (e.g., alcoholism), disabilities, people who are old and not functioning well, etc. If an elderly person is scammed out of their money, I don't feel 'tough shit' is a good response.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#600

Post by tw04 » Tue, May 31, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

The system already tells them tough shit. If you're on welfare and spend it all, you don't just get more food stamps. Why should this be any different?