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Request For Research: Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#601

Post by branchless »

Tsagadai wrote: post #530
surfmike wrote: post #97

"What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make. What could make a difference? - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term…

Housing is almost impossible to fix at this point. Housing is seen more as an asset class than a social requirement (although, not everyone thinks this way there are enough people with money that it doesn't matter what they think, it is an asset class). The majority of the issues you highlight are caused by the amount of capital moving into real estate and the amount of resistance to change is directly proportional t…

If we don't change this you can forget it. Land is the issue, it's been the issue for hundreds of years.

The ability to expand into free land was what made the USA different. You could take a job for the man on subsistence wages or set up yourself. That's why you had to have slavery. In the UK with land enclosure the prison is the country.

We should tax land and stop the exploitation of workers by rentiers.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#602

Post by gavingmiller »

This has actually already been studied/tried in the 70's in Dauphin, Manitoba [1][2]. The experiment saw a decrease in accidents, injuries, and mental health issues.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-povert...

[2] http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-experi...

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#603

Post by clavalle »

Spooky23 wrote: post #507
clavalle wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with basic income is that people need purpose, not charity. > I think we need to figure out how to empower people. I don't think anything you've said is incompatible with something like basic income. What could be more empowering than knowing your basic needs will be taken care of? From that position of strength you can negotiate with others based on mutual benefit rather than avoiding the consequences…

You're missing the point and reading thing that I didn't write. People don't want your charity. They want a chance to earn a living. When you give people everything they need to subsist, but nothing to do, it doesn't give them "freedom". It creates dependency. Nobody in Silicon Valley has basic income. They have ripe opportunity for productive employment. That's the safety net that facilitates risk.

>Nobody in Silicon Valley has basic income.

Savings, financial support structures through their family, direct funding, and skills they can easily turn into funds. These are not basic income but they have the same effect: they allow the freedom to bargain from a position of strength without worrying about starving or going homeless or other basic needs unpleasantness. They have breathing room to create. And they do.

Imagine a world where, in order to create a new business, someone had to enter a walled city, give up all savings, were forbidden to take money from outside sources and must work full time (at least) at the same time in order to earn their daily rations of food and a bed while they are at it. That is the world the poor live in, more or less. The walled city is the planet Earth.

You mention dependency but you forgot the qualifier: on government. The poor live in dependency right now -- they are dependent on their employer to live week to week. They work, not to better their situation, but to keep from losing what little they have. It is the illusion of freedom.

You mention charity, but my position has nothing to do with charity and making people comfortable just because. It is about putting people in a position where their every transaction, if we assume they are rational, are guaranteed to create value. That helps all of us.

It is about giving people a hard floor to stand on. They will find things to do, just like most people with money and resources find a way to add value to the world -- because it improves their situation.

We don't need to worry about keeping people busy...they can figure out for themselves what is best for them and the world doesn't improve your situation unless you improve the world. I trust they'll figure that out.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#604

Post by nunobrito »

tptacek, please don't apply racist comments on this article.

When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction.

Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#605

Post by ap22213 »

Mz wrote: post #355

In my opinion, "we tried this before" and it didn't work. We didn't call it Basic Income, but we have some historcal examples of large scale attempts to guarantee everyone gets a share. Famous failures include communism. I do not care how you arrange this research, it will not tell you what will happen under real world conditions. There is plenty of instructive data from the real world that you can look at. For examp…

It seems like you're assuming that in our future there will be plenty of jobs for average people to earn a 'living wage' (i.e. enough to pay for basic shelter, food, clothing, education, medical treatment, etc.). What makes you confident in that given that forecasts of economic growth show significant stagnation and trends show increased automation of jobs?

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#606

Post by sah2ed »

marknutter wrote: post #315
tluyben2 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not have startups have their employees work from home? Much simpler and easier to implement solution. I don't have the obsession of wanting to live in a city but I'm aware most people I know who don't have that obsession either still have to because their bosses does not let them work from home. If you only have to come in once a month or less you can live in a region where housing is affordable; I could buy a li…

Instead you have companies like YCombinator and Facebook requiring people to move into an already overpopulated area to do work that could just as easily be done over the wire.

Well, this is not strictly true about YC since they now have YC Fellowships [1] that can be completed remotely.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974552

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#607

Post by petra »

padobson wrote: post #378

* Solve problems in hiring by hiring all applicants on a first-come, first-serve basis and then evaluating them for X days before recommending the best applicants to a client company. Scale this up by partnering with the government to eliminate traditional unemployment insurance. * Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no c…

>> -A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10.

There's a model for "direct from farmer meat": you pay a monthly $3-5 rent for a meat locker in your city , and than you can cheaply buy meat online from a variety of farmers . It does cut costs. And of course , this allows a group of people to buy in volume.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#608

Post by imtringued »

abakker wrote: post #285
surfmike wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excavation is expensive and that's the main reason people don't use it. Trains are hard to build in established areas but self-driving cars, ride sharing, and hyper loop point to new ways enabled by technology. I agree that zoning is the big political obstacle. But I feel like some development entrepreneurs could convince some cities and make some great examples of dense livable neighborhoods.

In can't help but think that the only real answer to getting housing to be appropriately cheap is to manufacture it 100% off site and bring it to the site in easy to assemble pieces.

Isn't that the whole point of prefab houses?

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#609

Post by ap22213 »

samstave wrote: post #65

I want to add the following idea, which I have mentioned here on HN several times: I humbly submit this as my solo-founder, idea-only HN application; The Standard Pantry. The standard pantry is literally just that - a pantry of a set of basic ingredients that go along with a range of standard recipes and a weekly menu schedule. Provide this standard pantry as a partially subsidized offering and teach people how to ma…

...which requires surplus energy and sufficient free time

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#610

Post by branchless »

jacquesm wrote: post #469
sama wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes--driving down the cost of housing is one of the things I think about the most. It seems so critical to the whole equation.

To drive down the cost of housing you'd have to drive down the cost of land in places where lots of people want to live. The house is the smaller part of that equation, unless you're looking at the third world and there a whole pile of other problems come in to play.

And to do this you'd have to stop the banks financialising people's lives. They are simply working out how much of labour they can possibly take and then that is how much the land is.

In the UK women going to work saw banks change their lending criteria from:

* 3 times primary income

to:

* 3 (or 4) times household income

voila prices double, the rentiers get more interest and the govt sees more money printed via mortgage lending and call it "growth". Meanwhile the man on the street hands over all his labour to the money creation monopolists.

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