Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, the cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cogn…
I'm truly sorry to hear that. I don't see why narcolepsy should be a problem, especially in our area. I mean sure, meetings and stuff like that might be harder to do, but our industry is/should be lenient to things like office hours. There have been tons of times where I go to the office at "late hours" (e.g. 1+ PM), and as long as I turn in my deliverables on time (or let my lead know I won't be able to), there is n…
Request For Research: Basic Income
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#762"
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.
Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don't get paid?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. Actually, we're all like yourself and Dr. Cochrane.
"
sama asks, "What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" It's a good question. I think one answer that is not limited to startups, but applies to everyone, is to spread the idea and ideals that embody an egalitarian, post-scarcity, society. Star Trek happens to be an entertaining depiction. It doesn't have much in the way of details when it comes down to it, but it embodies the ideas and values of an egalitarian, post-scarctiy, existence where people don't just sit around all day playing video games, but work to better themselves and the rest of humanity.
Giving people money isn't enough. We need to also promote and live a set of values that will compliment Basic Income. We need to free ourselves from the fear of survival, but we must have the proper mindset and environment to ensure a successful freedom.
So, startups, invent replicators[1] so we can move to a post-scarcity economy and everyone, spread the word that it's time for our society to evolve so we can garner the support required for instituting Basic Income.
I completely agree with sama when he says, "I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale." Thus this experiment is less about whether Basic Income is a good idea, and more about how to ensure that it is a good idea and implemented successfully. I think you really need to pay attention to perceptions and societal values which requires education (plenty of startup activity here).
1. Spread the word
2. Invent replicators [2]
3. Get the messaging, education, values, mental models, etc right
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)
[2] Half joking, but serious.
[3] I'll try to update this comment as thinking clarifies as this topic is so large it's overwhelming.
[4] My other comment about Basic Income hopefully helping to resolve poor incentives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985443
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Access to money transfer as a basic human right" is a brilliant way to reframe the conversation around financial services. I'm gonna start talking about transaction fees from that perspective now. And yeah, good luck extracting the banks from the profit-making niches they've carved out in that process. They will fight that to their last breath.
It seems to be a very American thing to not have banking as a basic right (or at least assumed right). Here in New Zealand, there's pretty much no restriction on getting bank accounts. It's almost unheard of to not have a bank account. Transaction fees aren't really a thing either. Most people only have to pay to withdraw money from other banks ATMs. There's no fees for bank transfers (regardless of whether it's to t…
Instead we depend on forms of payment which have latency measured in days (checks, direct deposit) and we process debit card transactions on a delay of hours to days. If you are playing close to $0 it's very easy to make a mistake and then fall below $0. The bank has effectively trusted you not to do this, and you did it, so they charge you a fee as punishment. Except you have less than $0, you can't pay the fee.
If you do this, then your bank might close your account and put you on the ChexSystems blacklist, which will prevent you from getting any new accounts for a few years.
AFAIK ChexSystems blacklisting is pretty much the only reason to be unbanked (except by choice as a form of protest, I guess?) Simply doing proper OLTP would eliminate the weird artifact that is overdraft and entirely sidestep the problem of unbanked people.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
Financial desperation squeezes the cognitive juice right out of you. In 2013, Harvard researchers did a study of how financial stress affects decision making. Denise Cummins, Ph.D. explains their findings in Psychology Today: "When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, a very different picture emerged: The cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the i…
I was thinking about that, and about the story of Ferguson Missouri, where some huge portion of the (largely African American) population had arrest warrants over petty fines that had blossomed through late fees and default judgements into financial catastrophes levied by the (largely middle class white) municipal government, with the last few suggestions.
It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies: one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities. Everyone would just have two numbers in their bank account, for each of the country's two official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from trade in the economy would be in the other.
Economists liken money to votes for demand in a decentralized allocation scheme. They liken taxes and fines to punishing people by taking away their voting-weight in said scheme, relegating them to suboptimal options that they wouldn't have voted for. (Basically, the equivalent of pairing them up with a non-first-choice partner in the Stable Marriage Problem.)
This works fine at a theoretical level where every agent is participating in economy X without depending on economy X (e.g. an economy consisting wholly of foreign investors), but falls apart when people are expected to also eat and live in some of the things they vote for, because those things have inelastic demand—taxing/fining people doesn't make them consume any less of those things, because they need to consume those things; and frequently inelastic supply—there just aren't options for places to live below a certain cost, because all the suppliers' prices are being "floated up" by said inelastic demand.
If, instead, we said something like:
• A new currency—"necessity dollars"—is allocated to people by the government each month to pay for a basket of goods with inelastic demand. The original currency persists, renamed "nicety-dollars."
• Necessity-dollars can only be used for goods and services with inelastic demand (as found by the BLS during CPI calculation), though they are not restricted to goods with any particular "moral cleanliness" value (so cigarettes are just as applicable as bread†.) This is enforced by only permitting certain sellers to accept necessity-dollars, and only on certain transactions.
• At point-of-first-sale, necessity-dollars are actually sent off to the government and the seller receives nicety-dollars instead. There's probably some exchange-rate involved, that the government can manipulate to some interesting end. Thus, companies never hold necessity-dollars, or pay out in necessity-dollars; they're just a thing individuals have and transparently give back to the government at payment-processing time.
• You can't tax or fine anyone in necessity-dollars. People just receive them, hold them in an account, and spend them voluntarily, and that's it: no other operations are valid. Importantly, banks aren't allowed to impose necessity-dollar fees on necessity-dollar accounts for holding them, and so forth. (They could impose nicety-dollar fees on fancy necessity-dollar accounts, but see the next point:)
• If you get taxed or fined or liened or collected on for anything in nicety-dollars, and you don't have enough nicety-dollars, this doesn't "spill over": you can't pay a nicety-dollar cost in necessity-dollars. You're not allowed. This means that if you run out of nicety-dollars, you're effectively bankrupt (in all the current meanings of that word—all the same machinery kicks in), while still being able to afford necessities. Your niceity-creditors get chased off/annulled by your bankruptcy, without disrupting your ability to afford necessities.
---
† Addiction causes need just like hunger does. You can't really economically disincentivize addicts from seeking a fix; that's basically definitional. Addicts under pressure commit crimes to get the money to pay for their fix, rather than going without. Just freakin' build the infrastructure to treat addiction, if you don't want people spending taxpayer money that way.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
A thought experiment: What about building a new city in the middle of nowhere, with the sole goal of extremely reducing living costs , and designing the laws specifically for that ,including making housing costs extremely cheap?
No need for thought experiments, we have history. Company towns are good examples of this (see [Roxby Downs]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxby_Downs,_South_Australia) ) as are cult headquarters. An oil rig is another example, housing costs are usually free (covered by employment), living facilities are provided free of charge and costs are usually fixed through corporate oversight and union opposition to changes.…
So it's probably can be done better.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#766Abraham Maslow addressed the psychology of basic needs in the 1940's. http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away. Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#767Abraham Maslow addressed the psychology of basic needs in the 1940's. http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away. Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
>Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs Why not just eliminate that in the first place and proceed directly to the "more enriching needs"?
Time and again these experiments only prove that for 6-12 months the subjects are euphoric, creative, motivated... until they require the next level of enrichment, which they don't know how to achieve, because they've skipped "level 1" in the game of life.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#768I don't have any research published in a related field, but I'm tempted to send in a proposal. Would the researcher have to live in San Francisco for this?
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#769This is beyond awesome: an effort truly to explore this with an open mind, measuring whether and how it might work in the real world, and doing it in a no-nonsense, zero-pretense way.
Kudos to YC and kudos to Sam Altman.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#770Abraham Maslow addressed the psychology of basic needs in the 1940's. http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away. Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
I totally agree. Children born into wealth and privilege are completely hobbled by the lack of this fear drive. We should institute 100% inheritance tax, and all children, rich or poor, should be taken away from their parents and raised in orphanages with only enough funds to keep them from outright starving or freezing to death.
As the saying goes: “When a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with the experience winds up with the money and the person with the money winds up with the experience”.