Request For Research: Basic Income

But if you hate working, you want to retire as early as possible to have as much non-working time as possible.

It is always ironic when the leisure class who have enough money to do as they wish from birth become very concerned that the poor simply aren't EARNING the right to eat, sleep, and rest.

I have chronic fatigue that, until treated, was quite disabling. I have some other more private health concerns that add up to about twice my rent. If you have a chronic health condition, access to health care is a major and fundamental concern: I just left a job that was killing me, and am temporarily unemployed, and COBRA with a $500 premium is my cheapest option by far. If I hadn't spent the last year saving as much as I could, I'd be in a lot of trouble.

I didn't choose to be sick. I don't want handouts either. I am very fortunate. But I do think it's a damn shame that health insurance is so tightly coupled with employment when employers come and go but your health follows you everywhere. I can't imagine that a public option would be worse than this.

I hail originally from Spain, a country with extremely cheap college education compared to the US. Did free college provide better outcomes? Only to a point. Spain is a country with over 20% unemployment. The country is full of people with college degrees who can't get a job anywhere near their field. Given that degrees are so common, they become artificial gates: You are asked for a degree to do jobs that do not need a degree at all!

How do you really find a good job then? Mostly through family networking. And who has a good family network? The same kids that could afford college regardless. Many college educations are just years wasted, not unlike bad degrees in the US. No matter how many people might think about the wonders of classical educations, and how college taught them to learn, and similar drivel, in practice, those things only matter if you have opportunities handed to you anyway. For people that do not get the opportunities, college is only helpful if it helps them get the opportunities! Whether that's through non-family networking, or because what they studied in college is something in demand in the job market.

When studying the effects of any policy change, we have can't just stop at the first level: We have to see how the rest of the world will react to the primary results to the policy change. It's a bit how student loans didn't really make it that much easier to go to college: What they really did was make all colleges a lot more expensive, making a mistake in major and/or institution that much more dangerous. I think of a friend of mine, Ph.D in Biology with a 6 figure college debt, and no good American jobs that would take her. She's teaching technical english in Japan, because it pays marginally better than her American options! All those years of study, all that money, to go unused, along with being saddled with terrible debt.

So all I am saying is, bad outcomes can happen in a whole lot of cases. Want better outcomes? Create more jobs.

Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?...but decreasing the cost of living as well.

I note decreasing the cost of living is by definition deflation. Preventing deflation is an explicit objective of central banks around the world.

I think there are gaps in our economic knowledge. There are different types of deflation, such as deflation through technology, deflation through a economy restructuring itself, deflation through cyclical unemployment. Central banks don't differentiate between them, and do all they can to prevent all of them from happening. It's like taking immune system suppressants because the white blood cell count is high, no matter the situation, even when it's high because you've got a cold.

Therefore, I think startups that can be involved in increasing our knowledge of the economics can increase prosperity for everyone, so central banks don't perform actions that prevent people from becoming prosperous.