Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Request For Research: Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#661

Post by terramars »

probably too late for a meaningful comment -

any screening you do on basic income recipients totally invalidates the point of studying basic income (and basic income itself), beyond some really basic stuff. my suggestion : pick a town / neighborhood / whatever at random (preferably relatively poor with a population between 500-1000) and give everyone living in it at the time $1k/month over the next 5 years (even if they move). i think it's safe / wise to exclude anyone who's retired or on disability since that defeats the purpose of the experiment as they already receive entitlement funds. how you handle children i have no idea. maybe parents should get a reduced amount per child?

in other words, if you have qualifications like "poor and motivated", or even just "poor", then the basic income experiment is really a grant program. it's really important philosophically that you DON'T NEED TO DO ANYTHING to get basic income. most work is NOT VALUABLE. society is better off with more people being "lazy" and doing whatever they feel like, especially as automation increases in prevalence and importance. if 50% of people on basic income decide not to work, that's fine because the other 50% will be perfectly capable of doing everything that actually needs to get done, particularly with the safety net of not having to worry about failure quite so much.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#662

Post by Rhapso »

Would it be possible for a company to issue profit earning shares to every US citizen? Right now, that would be on the order of $100 a person per year for the most profitable US companies but it is an interesting possible vehicle for a company to push for basic income.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#663

Post by sokoloff »

tptacek wrote: post #458
panglott wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but all of those sound like things that are going to help people who were already going to be successful to be even more successful. College debt, for example, is a problem for those who were successful enough to get into college into the first place, and who, simply by getting into college, are already increasing their lifetime earnings by millions of dollars. Technological services for K-12 ed is pushing a s…

I'm not a big believer in minimizing college debt. I'm a believer in minimizing college . People who grow up in wealthy families naturally find themselves on a college track that seamlessly routes them to elite schools when they're 18 years old. People who grow up in poverty aren't on that track and might not even have much agency (due to their circumstances, requirements to work young, entanglements with the law) un…

One concern is that, especially during the transition, job descriptions requiring "4-year college degree" would become a de-facto (and legal) means of discriminating by class or social status, assuming that the rich would overwhelmingly continue to send their kids to college.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#664

Post by keerthiko »

Improving transit is a large opportunity space. Reducing the need for civilian-ownership of vehicles

- reduces cost of living (cheaper than car ownership)

- reduces number one cause of human mortality

- frees up tons of parking-lot space for additional housing

- reduces strain on roads offsetting transit maintenance costs

- reduces pollution

Focusing on optimizing and improving quality of transit rather than just having it for the sake of it makes a huge difference in the quality of life of the area. This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes, etc.

The other space I'm thinking of is a lot harder for startups to attack, but is worth thinking about anyway -- international labor mobility. This requires world-wide cooperation to work, but there are countries like Japan and Sweden with declining population but still fairly difficult immigration procedures. The world's resources would be used so much more efficiently if it were easier to redistribute people based on their skills, needs and desires with places that had the space and resources to support them and benefit from them. Technology can certainly help here, but it needs a lot more logistical ingenuity than technology.

Another one is reclaiming human resources -- prisoners and the destitute. Majority of these people are able-bodied and/or able-minded, yet it is nearly impossible to gain any value from them because of how society is structured around their status. If we had dedicated, streamlined processes to appropriately assess and reinstate these people back in society, they'd turn from a economic burden into an asset.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#665

Post by tptacek »

sokoloff wrote: post #663
tptacek wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big believer in minimizing college debt. I'm a believer in minimizing college . People who grow up in wealthy families naturally find themselves on a college track that seamlessly routes them to elite schools when they're 18 years old. People who grow up in poverty aren't on that track and might not even have much agency (due to their circumstances, requirements to work young, entanglements with the law) un…

One concern is that, especially during the transition, job descriptions requiring "4-year college degree" would become a de-facto (and legal) means of discriminating by class or social status, assuming that the rich would overwhelmingly continue to send their kids to college.

My concern is that they already are that.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#666

Post by phaus »

I'm intrigued by the idea of a basic income, but usually when people begin to talk about it, I see a certain argument presented.

A simplified version of the argument is as follows: "In a free market, if a certain subset of people start making significantly more money than they used to, the demand for things that this subset of people couldn't afford before is going to increase substantially. This increase in demand will inevitably lead to higher prices for the things that they can suddenly afford, which will essentially put them back where they started."

Can anyone briefly explain to me why this argument is wrong? On the surface, it seems fairly reasonable. For example, the ridiculous cost of education is often attributed to the creation of federal student loans. Unless that attribution is also mistaken, it seems to represent a valid example of this phenomenon.

Please note that I'm not condoning or even agreeing with this argument. Its just something I've been wondering about for a while. I figure there are plenty of smart people here that can probably explain it to me.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#667

Post by existencebox »

Let me bring front and center something that has gotten a surprisingly (to me) small portion of this discussion:

ENABLE MORE REMOTE WORK. Why am I living in a high cost area? Because this is where the jobs are. Why are costs high? Because thousands of other engineers essentially _need_ to do the same thing.

So to answer Sam's original question with another question, in addition to merely making this a one sided "businesses must be more accommodating"; What can engineers do to increase remote worker availability for startups? (Companies in general, but inverted Sam's wording for more poetic "fit") What pain point solvers, major technologies, processes, etc are missing that would make truly distributed teams less of a risk, or more desirable? While I certainly think there are already great reasons (you get access to more talent potentially lower cost, more "diversity" out of box, more flexibility from your workforce and less overhead per employee) I'd be curious to hear how this dovetails with what the powers that be think are missing.

(In the case that one thinks there are intractable problems re: remote, I'd also be curious to hear those for the purpose of confronting this problem regardless.)

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#668

Post by Throwaway23412 »

nunobrito wrote: post #604

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.

It's fascinating that you seem to find the "largely middle class white" part racist but not the "largely African American" part racist.

Also, saying the Ferguson protests were about "not paying bills" is like saying Occupy Wall Street was about "skipping work". It smacks of either absolute ignorance or some sort of deliberate agenda.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#669

Post by spikels »

sama wrote: post #213
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…

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.

This is the key because it drives up the cost of everything in a vicious cycle.

This is theoretically the one of the easiest big problems to solve - just stop preventing developers from building new housings and they will gladly build as much if not. Ore than we need.

Unfortunately in practice it would take something like a revolution. Are there any examples of this happening? I only know of examples where we make the problem worse and worse.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#670

Post by spikels »

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.

Building up and downsizing unit size is the natural solution to expensive land (i.e. just use less land per home). While building up has some costs it is zoning/planning regulations that prevent this in practice.
Post reply on HN