
Basic Income Has Silicon Valley to Thank - cryoshon
http://mic.com/articles/124874/what-is-basic-income-and-where-did-it-come-from
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mgrpowers
Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person. I've
mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco
or Boston.

I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The
per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including
health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city
this size whose primary export is corn.

I'm a huge basic income fan and would like to contribute to the conversation I
just don't know where to start.

~~~
WorldMaker
One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to
actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME)

The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for
the elderly) and attempt to extrapolate what/how you would expand the program
to cover every citizen. For instance, examining the impact of fixed incomes on
the elderly versus the cost of living in various parts of the country and how
the elderly today are already coping with such issues.

Another direction I've been trying to keep an eye on and follow as best I can
is the discussions and work going on in (fringe) economics under the name
"Modern Monetary Theory":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory)

~~~
dragonwriter
> One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to
> actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment

Mincome was not an _unconditional_ basic income, which is what the recent
"basic income" efforts have been about. It was a means-tested social benefit
program (though with perhaps _lighter_ administrative overhead, since it was a
strictly cash-benefit program with _only_ outside income affecting grant
eligibility, rather than the rather complex set of factors typical of social
benefit programs.)

Most of the benefits claimed from UBI are tied pretty specifically to the
_unconditional_ aspect. OTOH, its results are interesting in that even with
the reduction in benefits for outside income ($0.50 benefit reduction on each
$1 of outside income), only teenagers and new mothers worked substantially
less. This is interesting in considering UBI, since UBI has _less_ reduction
in incentive to work (no reduction in benefit for outside income).

> The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for
> the elderly)

Social Security isn't even approximately a basic income -- benefits are
determined by tax payments (ultimately, by income earned in jobs subject to
Social Security tax.)

~~~
WorldMaker
Thanks for some technical distinctions. It's useful here to compare the boring
reality with the ideal vision, which is again why these are useful directions
to look.

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gpsx
I think basic income solves one of two important problems. The problem it
doesn't solve is what people will do with their time. I'd like to see a
requirement that everyone work. The exact definition of work would have to be
determined along with a way of measuring/enforcing it. This might not be easy.
There is always more work that can be done. One source of work could be a
government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with
pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov.

~~~
WorldMaker
«The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time.»

What would you do with your time if you weren't _required_ to work for your
living? I'd spend more time writing fiction and videogames, personally. Others
want to act, write poetry, create art, perform music, romance, raise kids, the
list extends out to so many extremes of human expression and desire.

I'd probably read more books and play more videogames and attend more
concerts, too. There would certainly be a lot more Netflix binging, in
general. But the problem here is that people see such culture (leisure) as
sinful/wasteful, rather than a goal, a possibly better human existence. If
more people have leisure time, so what?

At some point we have to admit to ourselves (as this is deep in the American
DNA at this point) that the Puritans were wrong and backbreaking labor is not
the end all/be all of human experience. It's not a more "pure" life to work
ourselves to death and it's not "guilty" or "irrational" or "wasteful" to
balance some pleasure and leisure into one's life. People should not have to
"earn" a right to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy: they should have
food, shelter, safety, health. Why should "work" be an entry bar to claiming
one's basic rights as a human being in a caring society?

The concept of "basic income" is that everyone gets it, regardless of
qualification. If people want to earn income over and above that, they are
welcome to: there will still be startups and companies and projects that will
(need to) pay for labor. If people want to live on the bare minimum that
"basic income" provides for them and spend the rest of their life in relative
leisure, then let them. What harm does that do to society? If companies have
such a great need for that extra labor they would be missing they can pay the
value that that loss of leisure is actually worth and lure the "lazy" out of
leisure through enough incentive.

If someone tries to leave beyond their means and uses "basic income" as a
crutch they'll quickly find themselves dealing with the same disincentives
that poor people already face: bad credit, collections agency, the prison-
industrial complex.

Already productivity statistics are telling us that there are fewer jobs
needed than people that exist in this country, and with increasing automation
this trend will only get worse. We can't enforce 100% employment, and why
should we? Instead, we need a solution for a (much) less than 100% employment
world and punishing people with crippling poverty and debt seems like a far
less useful solution than whining that maybe some people might find a way to
take their basic income, find some shelter and a lifestyle that is sustainable
under it, and binge watch Netflix for the rest of their lives without ever
"working a job".

What you perceive as a problem here is a failed assumption: the Puritan belief
that people only live meaningful (sinless) lives if they devote themselves to
some hateful job and work to earn their way to a better life (heaven for the
Puritans; a leisure-full retirement if they are lucky after putting their nose
to the grindstone, in the case of the classic American middle class
propaganda).

Sorry for the long rant here, but it's just something that I think we have a
hard time talking about in America precisely because we've got a bundle of
culturally foundational DNA that makes it tough to talk about without first
attacking those foundational assumptions. Hopefully, maybe this helps explain
what you are missing in the concept?

~~~
gpsx
I also would have no problem figuring out what to do with my time. I would
pretty much do the same thing I do today, both at work and for my hobbies. My
hobbies of the last several years have ranged from triathlons, auto racing,
ballroom dancing, yoga and cooking. But not everyone is like you or I. There
are people who would choose to do something less constructive. The problem
comes when people choose to do something destructive. This is potentially a
real problem. I wish I had references related to this topic but I don't.

I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not
contributing to society. I don't worry that everyone would be lazy. I agree we
would still have startups and companies and advancement of knowledge.

The idea of basic income sounds good but would it really work in practice?
This is what needs to be discussed. I am try to raise a potential problem as
to why it might not work. (I am not the only one who has suggested this
problem.)

From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a
program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American
politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half
of the country also supports.

I am in agreement with you about wanting people to have a fulfilling life
outside of work. The definition of "work" would have to allow for people to
live a fulfilling life and not be slaves.

~~~
WorldMaker
«The problem comes when people choose to do something destructive.»

That's what we have disincentives such as the debt enforcement and the legal
system already in place for. If someone spends all of their basic income on
drugs rather than shelter/food, they likely commit a dumb sort of suicide or
wind up in the prison system.

The point of basic income is that you should have (as with any income) the
opportunity to make mistakes like that. For one reason, I don't want to stop
someone from using all their basic income on alcohol, because maybe I'll have
a nice job with good wages that meets my basic needs and the basic income goes
straight into my budget line item that reads "Top shelf bourbon"... More
importantly, basic income works best when it is unqualified and unmonitored
and real money: it can have the most economic impact if yes, some of it is
sometimes going to even the sketchiest of corner liquor stores. That corner
store is still going to have a local economic impact.

Adding a work requirement doesn't stop someone from doing something personally
destructive. (In some cases it is likely to incentivize personal destruction;
a bad job can cause suicidal thoughts or more inclination to do drugs.)

Of course, there's the question of larger scale societal destruction beyond
personal destruction: how you stop someone from spending all their basic
income on gas to burn and pollute? Ultimately that's a larger failure in the
way we operate our economy that maybe we should fix at the sources (we need a
better gas tax; we need carbon cap and trade).

«I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not
contributing to society.»

Then why would you need to bother micromanaging if any or all of them
participate in any sort of "work"? Basic income says we don't necessarily need
to redefine "work": we need to stop caring about it, stop policing it, stop
letting the labor market enslave people and telling people that fail in the
labor market (for any reason) that they are bad people and deserve the poor
lot in life that bad luck or poor circumstance handed them.

A great prospective thing about basic income is that it increases liquidity in
the labor market, making it actually a market where both sides (labor and
employers) can participate as equals and bargain with some amount of fairness.
If people _don 't_ need to work for a living, it means employers have to
actually compete for their labor. If people have a fallback plan (I'll just
live on my basic income for a while) they can more easily and more freely
change jobs as they see fit.

Redefining "work" and "requiring" it loses some of the nice qualities of that
potentially wonderful liquidity in the labor market.

«From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a
program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American
politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half
of the country also supports.»

I certainly wish we had more answers here. Basic income has been removed from
American political discussions several times now, by painting it with the use
of "Socialism" as a bad word.

We've already managed to get (and have a heck of a time defending every other
election cycle) basic income for two particularly innocent and defenseless
(used to be) minorities: the elderly and the disabled. We call it "Social
Security" and it mostly works rather well, when we aren't cutting or gouging
it. But the every eight years or so fights to even keep it in existence keeps
us from even mentioning the opposite possibility: expanding it.

"Workfare" isn't the answer here for a compromise because we've also already
got it, as a convoluted Frankenstein's monster of compromises: minimum wage,
unemployment insurance, EBT/"food stamps", welfare. These are already
"workfare" they all already require you to work or actively be seeking work
and have all sorts of very stringent requirements about when and how and where
you can use them.

The potential beauty for basic income is that it cleans all of that up, and
makes Uncle Sam and the State Governments a lot less nanny state. "Here's a
check, spend it however you wish" is a lot simpler than "Fill out these forms,
maybe you qualify for an audited debit card, here's the approved list of ways
to spend it, here's the list of steps to prove you are doing it right and how
often you need to do that..."

My biggest hope is that maybe you could get a cross aisle contingent of us
whacky socialist liberals and some fellow whacky "smaller government"
libertarians to somehow get together and join forces on the concept that
merging social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, welfare, food
stamps, et al into one, much, much simpler non-nanny-state program of basic
income, decreases the size of government and increases (hopefully) the
happiness of the people, and then maybe from the edges we might hope to
convince the large political middle (although probably not the moneyed "bases"
of our two parties)... It's a wonderful fantasy that maybe could happen? I
wish someone knew how to get the liberals/socialists and libertarians in the
same room together without the money or bullying of the party bases.

~~~
gpsx
We may disagree on whether to get people either money or money and something
to do with their time as soon as we as a society no longer need it from them.
On the other hand, I am firmly in agreement with you on wanting to see the the
liberals/socialist and libertarians get together and work out a mutually
agreeable solution to the problem. If only that could happen...

------
johnebgd
I don't see how the world moves forward without this but I don't see how
people used to the old way of doing things will accept it either...

~~~
dragonwriter
> I don't see how the world moves forward without this but I don't see how
> people used to the old way of doing things will accept it either...

You could just as easily say that about _any_ major change.

