
Hiring for Basic Income - mattkrisiloff
https://blog.ycombinator.com/hiring-for-basic-income/
======
Tycho
Apologies if this has been discussed extensively. But it occurs to me that the
US (and maybe other Western countries) has a retirement crisis - ie. people
have not saved nearly enough for their retirement, and state-related
pensions/entitlements are a massive strain on the budgets.

So with that in mind, how the heck can these countries even consider rolling
out a new "basic income" program? Doesn't this seem a bit incongruous?

~~~
Tarrosion
Part of the idea is that with a basic income, there's no longer a need for
many "social safety net" programs: disability, social security, food stamps,
medicaid, etc. The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their
nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income.

I'm not sure if this is true or not. You can find serious people with
reasonable seeming numbers on both sides of that argument.

~~~
eanzenberg
Right.. Basic income essentially wants to take mone out of the pot currently
reserved for the needy and disabled, and distribute it to able-bodied people
who choose not to enter the work force.

~~~
snuxoll
There's nothing inherently wrong with not entering the workforce in the post-
scarcity society we are rapidly approaching. People can instead choose to
spend time raising their children, practicing a hobby, or trying to start
their own business without fear of not being able to support themselves.

Most humans naturally don't want to sidle idle all their lives, some will, but
the vast majority will find some productive use of their time - a basic income
means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do
what they really want to do in their spare hours.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...a basic income means they don 't have to work 40 hours a week just to
survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours._

The data suggests that men, at least, really want to watch TV and take drugs.
They don't spend much time raising children or on civic engagement.

Here is a good survey article:

[https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-
miserable-21...](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-
miserable-21st-century/)

If you want to say "that isn't a true Scotsman/basic income", please explain
how writing "basic income" at the top of the check would change things.

~~~
dragonwriter
I'm assuming you intend to reference the discussion of disability benefits
late in that article; the key difference between that and basic income is that
disability benefits are received by people who are judged to be occupationally
disabled, which fall into two groups:

(1) People who _have_ worked and are actually _physically unable to do so any
longer_ (and, generally, for the same reason, inhibited in other important
life functions), and

(2) People who _wish_ not to work so much that they have engaged in elaborate
frauds to be adjudicated unable to work.

And, in _both_ cases, actually receiving money from work reduces their
eligibility for payments and may jeopardize their eligibility to receive
benefits at all.

I think its quite reasonable to believe that neither of those (nor the two
combined) would be representative in their use of money and their actions when
receiving a certain amount of money, _on top of_ the fact that receiving money
which is partially conditioned on non-work induces different behaviors (even
in the same set of people) than receiving unconditional funds.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The article discuss the fact that most of those who are consuming disability
benefits are not, in fact, physically unable to work.

This is readily apparent from the fact that disability claims are strongly
correlated with the economy; recessions do not cause people to become
paraplegics. And this rise is in spite of workplaces and daily life becoming
safer.

NPR also has an expose on rampant disability fraud, although they of course
use more polite language: [http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-
work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The article discuss the fact that most of those who are consuming disability
> benefits are not, in fact, physically unable to work.

That's a non-sequitur, as the distribution between group (1) and group (2) in
the GP post is immaterial to the argument made there.

If you want to address the points actually made in the post you are responding
to instead of throwing out irrelevancies, feel free to do so.

------
zaguios
For anyone who is interested, I actually recently started a basic income
experiment of my own. You can check it out here:
[https://www.swiftdemand.com/](https://www.swiftdemand.com/)

Essentially the way that it works is that anyone who signs up will receive 100
coins each day and they may be freely traded among users. Ideally over time
people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily
income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is
supposed to work. If anyone has any questions or suggestions relating to the
service I would love to discuss them.

~~~
wehadfun
How is the experiment going. Are people using this yet?

~~~
zaguios
You can check out some information on the stats page:
[https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats](https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats)

I actually only released the website less than a week ago so it's still
incredibly new, but people have already done some cool stuff with it. This guy
set up a website to write haikus in exchange for coins
[http://swiftpoetry.club/](http://swiftpoetry.club/)

I'm planning on setting up a service to allow people to more easily exchange
coins into their local countries currency and develop an API so websites can
more easily accept Swift Demand as a payment option, but these things are
still in the pipeline.

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minimaxir
Shouldn't this be posted in the Who is Hiring thread instead? :P

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amelius
I suppose that one good way to research BI is by making the national lotteries
provide a prize that basically corresponds to a BI, and then make sure that
participants agree to partake in the research (e.g., surveys).

------
selllikesybok
Might want to fix this -> [https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-
rhodes/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/author/elizabeth-rhodes/)

~~~
craigcannon
Fixed. Thanks for the heads-up!

~~~
selllikesybok
Hmm, Elizabeth's author profile still show's Matt's info, for me...

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thedogeye
The cost of basic income in the United States is about equal to the cost of
getting us off permanently off of fossil fuels.

This is going to send heads spinning as we decide which one we care about
more, poverty or the environment.

~~~
RyanZAG
Getting permanently off fossil fuels is a one-off cost. Basic income is an
ever increasing and perpetual cost.

I don't think they are comparable.

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cpursley
> Hiring for Basic Income

So much irony in just four words. I love it.

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desireco42
It is really cowardly to use throwaway account when posting.

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13708932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13708932)
and marked it off-topic.

------
thedogeye
Sweet! Where can I sign up to receive my basic income?

------
andrewla
One alternative to unconditional basic income would be an presence-based
minimum wage. The idea would be not only to replace welfare and social
security and other conditional income sources but also replace the idea of the
minimum wage with a funded mandate. I'm not sure where this idea came from,
though I believe I heard it attributed to Milton Friedman (though I've not
been able to find a reference).

The idea would be to have an auditorium, where you would come in and sit and
do nothing, and be paid the minimum wage when you leave based only on the
amount of time you spent in the room.

Individuals would be free to accept wages lower than the minimum wage for
outside jobs, but employers would have to compete with that minimum wage for
employees, so any lower wages offered would have to compete in other aspects
-- pensions, tips, benefits, opportunities for advancement, etc.

Because this would require physical presence, it would naturally be self-
limiting in some aspects of abuse; you can "sit" as many or as few hours as
you wish, but you cannot use that time for other productive work, so there's a
natural fall-off of benefits as you choose to work instead (rather than an
artificial administrative "cliff").

There are other aspects which seem very vulnerable to abuse -- why not just
sleep there, what about doing remote work on a laptop, what about setting up
shop and selling hot dogs in the room, etc. And there are some aspects which
seem logistically problematic -- how do people commute to the room, how many
rooms do you need, what about people who have disabilities that prevent them
from travelling, etc.

But generally all of these seem addressable, and some of them might just be
self-regulating by social norms, so that there is a small but acceptable
amount of leakage due to abuse.

It seems administrative simpler in some regards than UBI, in that the
uniqueness of a recipient is more easily enforceable, and it doesn't just
change the y-intercept of the income curve, but rather semi-truncates it, so
might be less vulnerable to attempting to extract the income through rent
increases.

It also more easily adjusts to location-based pricing sensitivity -- it's
totally reasonable for a place like SF to have a higher "minimum wage" than a
less expensive city (just as minimum wages can float from state to state), and
the requirement for physical presence makes it harder to game this.

~~~
lilactown
One of things I hope some sort of UBI-esque program would do is allow people
to create value in ways that are currently economically infeasible. This
solution stomps on that while keeping one of the worst aspects of our current
system, which is feeling stuck in a position where you're creating little
value/care very little about the work but are chained to it because of lack of
options.

~~~
andrewla
As I've mentioned in other replies, for the same amount of dollars pumped into
UBI (where it has to be distributed to the entire populace), this system can
distribute that money instead to a much, much smaller segment of the
population.

If, say, 10% of people opt to participate in "wasted-work", then each will
receive 10x the benefit they would get from UBI, meaning that would be able to
afford to save up money, or work part-time and still have sufficient money to
support themselves while they pursue the "creation of value in ways that are
currently economically infeasible".

UBI sounds great, but on a dollar-for-dollar basis it just seems worse than
this because the level of compensation cannot be as high.

