
Request For Research: Basic Income - mattkrisiloff
https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income
======
sama
Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a
critical component as well. I'd be very interested to hear thoughts from the
HN community about what we could be doing here.

Edit: please respond in the main thread so we don't get an unbalanced comment
tree. I'll be in the discussion here for a couple hours, but if it feels like
there's momentum in the ideas we might do a proper Ask HN about it next week.

------
tptacek
Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a
radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups
could actually do:

* Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old.

* Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based turnkey hiring solutions that outperform interviews for non-technology roles like marketing, purchasing, &c, so that people who avail themselves of alternatives to universities can get good jobs regardless of social signals.

* Tools that make it possible for companies that today exploit the 1099 labor classification to cost-effectively offer benefits and handle taxes, to make on-demand employment legal and fair while remaining competitive.

* Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners.

* Technology-mediated services that drastically improve outcomes in K12 education.

* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care.

* Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services.

* Tools to improve engagement with local elections and make it easier for people to take flyers on standing for election.

* Modernized fee and fine collection for things like traffic and parking tickets, which currently default out to "charging minimum wage workers $2,000 to get the boot off the car on which they happen to owe 3 parking tickets".

* Similarly: a way to do things like enroll a credit card with your local government to automatically pay fines and fees at their reduced early-payment rate --- which is something you might be able to do without getting permission from local governments.

 _Later: I added some things_

~~~
stcredzero
_Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that
don 't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions
they have to make when they're 18 years old._

Why not just free university education for people who have the prerequisite
academic qualifications?

~~~
tptacek
* There are limited seats available at the highest-status universities, so admission to those schools will remain a privilege disproportionately available to wealthy parents who can pay to game the admissions process.

* Simply attending a 4-year university has costs beyond tuition and books; there are plenty of people who don't go to college because they can't afford 4 years out of the workforce.

* The 4-year university system is extremely brittle, in that it creates good outcomes primarily for people who are in the right place (somewhere they can easily attend a good university) at the right time (right after they graduate high school) --- do anything to get off the college track during your high school years and it becomes extremely hard to re-engage with it.

~~~
arohner
Yes. I'll also add the 4-year education is incredibly inefficient, in terms of
skills added over time. Even in highly technical STEM degrees, you probably
don't need 4 years "full time" to gain all of the skills an employer expects a
fresh-out-of-school STEM graduate to have. The same is even more true of less
technical degrees.

~~~
termain
"Yes. I'll also add the 4-year education is incredibly inefficient, in terms
of skills added over time"

I'm uncomfortable with the idea that a university degree is entirely about
workforce skills.

~~~
dikaiosune
It shouldn't be, but there are a lot of people who don't give a damn about a
liberal education for themselves, and just want a degree to improve employment
opportunities. For them, I think it's kind of a sham to say that the only way
to get the jobs they want is to sit through lots of non-employment-related
material.

Would our society be better if more citizens were liberally educated and
thusly enriched? Perhaps. But that doesn't invalidate the desire to offer
students greater opportunities at lower opportunity cost.

~~~
neuro_imager
I know I'm at risk of sounding tremendously disparaging but, how critical is
it to actually go to college to get a liberal arts education?

Can most of these aspects of a "more well-rounded education" not come from
reading, travelling and extra-curricular activities (like music lessons and
trips to the theatre)?

~~~
dikaiosune
I agree completely, and that is my approach. But not everyone agrees. I would
prefer to study history, philosophy and literature because I enjoy them, not
for class. On the other hand, not everyone who would be interested in those
things would do that without some place to make it official, so I still see a
reason for schools that make it their focus to exist. However trying to
improve the populace through underfunded, half baked, required courses taught
by rote memorization specialists... I don't really agree with that since most
students are just there for "job skills" anyway.

------
surfmike
"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 storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable
real estate.

\- improvements in transportation. Making transportation faster and more
comfortable means more people can affordably live within commute distance of
prosperous urban areas (say, the SF peninsula)

\- advocacy: pushing for changes to zoning rules to allow dense, livable
communities, bringing more housing to our cities. For example, imagine turning
a shopping center + parking lot into a pedestrian-only mixed-use urban area,
modeled on the best dense cities out there (like Tokyo, Munich, Stockholm,
etc). This requires a combination of property developers with a strong vision,
changes to zoning laws, and a strategy for overcoming NIMBYs.

~~~
sama
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
branchless
And to do this you'd have to stop the banks financialising people's lives.
They are simply working out how much of labour they can possibly take and then
that is how much the land is.

In the UK women going to work saw banks change their lending criteria from:

* 3 times primary income

to:

* 3 (or 4) times _household_ income

voila prices double, the rentiers get more interest and the govt sees more
money printed via mortgage lending and call it "growth". Meanwhile the man on
the street hands over all his labour to the money creation monopolists.

------
bishnu
It's worth reading about the Canadian experiments with basic income in the
1970s:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome)
[http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-what-
th...](http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-what-the-poverty-
advocates-forget-about-canadas-flirtation-with-a-basic-income)

The experiment allowed households to opt out, and after a while most did.
However this result is convoluted by the fact that the income was not
inflation indexed, and inflation rates in Canada in the 1970s got quite high.

The main conclusion from this is, basic income is going to have to be VERY
carefully implemented to work at all.

~~~
objectivistbrit
Or New Zealand's research into the feasibility of implementing UBI:

[http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...](http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Working%20papers/Treasury-
A-Guaranteed-Minimum-Income-for-New-Zealand%20.PDF)

Key takeaways:

"An income of $300 per week is just over the average (mean) benefit income –
therefore a plausible minimum income. However, paying a guaranteed income of
$300 per week to every New Zealander aged 16 years and over, excluding
superannuitants, comes at considerable fiscal cost. The fiscal cost of the GMI
proposed in the first model (Model 1) is $44.5 billion (including the cost of
all social transfers – in particular, New Zealand Superannuation payments,
would cost $55.5 billion), requiring a flat personal tax rate of approximately
45.4%. Note that this tax rate and the others considered below are cost-
neutral – not fiscally neutral – as personal taxes currently raise
approximately $6 billion in excess of current social assistance costs."

"Although the Gini coefficient improves under all models, many beneficiaries
(including the disabled, carers and sole parents) currently receive more than
$300 per week and would be made financially worse off under a GMI scheme.
Therefore the GMIs considered could distribute money away from those most in
need of government assistance and toward those who have choices and
opportunities but choose not to work."

~~~
chii
this is actually a really good read about it. Perhaps a lot of comments on HN
is skewed towards the young tech worker who sees himself as victimized in a
souless wage slavery, but we don't hear any opinions on UBI from the truly
needy - the homeless, the chronic unemployed etc.

~~~
ddod
The "truly needy" is a subjective concept. Determining who should get more
money from the government is always going to be a judgment call necessitating
the presumption that we're not all equal. Most people who oppose welfare,
corporate welfare, or their implementations do so because they perceive the
recipients are not "truly needy". UBI is the only just and democratic way to
provide welfare.

------
davidw
There's a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work,
Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies -
[http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu](http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu) ) , that I just read last
night:

> "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who
> found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-
> being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a
> spouse, and that little of this decline is due to the loss of income;
> instead, it arises from a loss of self-worth."

The idea being that a basic income is fine, but having people sit around idle
probably isn't.

~~~
jdoliner
I've always wondered if its actually the joblessness that degrades people's
self worth or the job search that must not be going to well and thus keeps
them jobless. Would a person without a job but with a basic income and thus
not feeling pressure to get a job experience the same hit to their self worth?

~~~
criddell
There's not going to be _an_ answer, of course.

I think a good source of data could be the population of retired people. I'm
pretty sure if I could afford to be retired, I could _easily_ keep busy the
rest of my life.

~~~
nickff
People who retire earlier die sooner; for each year earlier that one retires,
life expectancy is shortened by two months (and the results are robust against
different assumptions).[1] This would lead one to believe that working is good
for your health.

[1] [http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/17/retirement-kills-a-new-
ma...](http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/17/retirement-kills-a-new-marketplace-
podcast/)

~~~
OldSchoolJohnny
Obligatory: causation, correlation mention - surely people who are sicker
retire sooner?

~~~
nickff
Obligatory: RTDA. Surely people who read citations before posting won't ask
these questions?

~~~
criddell
You said: People who retire earlier die sooner

It's actually true only for men.

~~~
nickff
Men are people too.

I never said all people would suffer early deaths from retirement. For all I
know, some people's lives may be prolonged.

------
larsiusprime
What I want to know is whether Basic Income implemented with our current
housing and laws about land ownership will just run afoul of the Henry George
Theorem:

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

IE, the aggregate value of public spending in an area tends to soak into the
land value -- give everybody $X,000 a year and the landlords will dutifully
raise annual rents by $X,000.

~~~
logfromblammo
I think it will. To avoid it, a significant portion of Basic Income would have
to be paid out as goods and services vouchers with redemption limits.

Rather than getting $50 a day as cash, you might get 4 nutritionally balanced
but generally unpalatable meal rations, two payment vouchers for one day in
one state-owned 250 sq.ft. housing capsule, 30 kWh of metered electricity, 100
gallons of potable water, 10 Gb of network bandwidth, etc. But you put
redemption limits in place so that you _can 't_ use vouchers to pay for more
than 1000 sq.ft. of capsules, 60 kWh of electricity, 200 gallons of water, or
20 Gb of electricity per day. It places limits on the amount of benefit any
single person could suck out of the system at the expense of everyone else in
it.

The state would also have to be a major wholesale buyer for those things, and
sometimes also set up and spin off new competitive suppliers, otherwise the
incumbent suppliers might be able to jack up the price and capture a portion
of the benefits intended for the end consumer. Taxes and subsidies have a
different mechanism of action economically than the entry of a new supplier
firm.

~~~
taurath
If the basic tenants and studies that have called basic income into the
forefront are to be believed (and the actual spectre of central state control
that people are afraid of in some circumstances is real, and it is), the best
way to benefit people in need is to give them cash. Most of the time, people
spend it on things they need. If they don't, they are either suffering from a
mental or addiction issue and need treatment, or they made mistakes and its
their own damn fault, and nobody needs to pity them.

~~~
logfromblammo
But on a grand scale, where everybody knows that everyone is getting the same
amount of free money, the market adjusts accordingly, within minutes.

You can give 20 people $100 each to spend as they see fit, and it wouldn't
affect the price of a Happy Meal. But if you give 100000 people $100 each, you
can bet that the price of that food is going up a bit, just because more
people can more easily afford a higher price.

Subsidy affects market equilibria differently than using the same amount of
resources to lower costs or increase supplier firms, or do industry-advocacy
advertising.

~~~
droffel
This is true, however, at a point in time where we are desperately attempting
to induce inflation in anything but assets (which was the end result of QE),
perhaps "helicopter money" in the form of a UBI would end up stimulating more
demand than QE did. Sure, we would experience some mild inflation in basic
goods prices, but in net, I think it would be a benefit. Isn't the Fed trying
to stimulate inflation anyways, and utterly failing?

~~~
logfromblammo
"We"? I do not share your opinion that the price inflation resulting from
monetary policy is in any way a good thing.

You can't stimulate demand with a subsidy. You can't depress demand with a
tax. Both of those things are manipulations to the natural equilibrium price,
and generate guaranteed deadweight losses.

The only way to "stimulate demand" is by changing what people's desires and
priorities, such as by advertising. People have to want now-things more than
potential future-things. Tricking them by pretending that they can have both
more now and more later and then revealing only after they buy that they will
actually have less later degrades trust, which causes more saving and
stockpiling, which reduces the velocity of commerce. That reduces the economic
leverage of controlling the size of the money supply.

You can't fool all the people all the time, and the ones you can't fool leak
their information through the market. Most people know by now that the market
can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. But we also know that
you don't need to outrun the tiger, you just need to outrun your friend. So
consumers are paying down debt, and companies are hoarding cash, hoping to be
the best-prepared survivors when the whole house of cards falls. Fed policy is
not taking into account the fact that it can't just print more confidence.

------
liamcardenas
I recommend this book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_%28book%29)

From wikipedia: "Allister Heath, deputy editor of the The Daily Telegraph,
wrote that the book shows how the “remarkable work ethic” of Scandinavians has
been eroded by large welfare states over time." (Of course, don't take
wikipedia's word for it-- read the book yourself)

My take-away: Heavy socialism has absolutely stifled economic growth in
Scandinavia. During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net private
sector job growth was ZERO.

If you want to stimulate economic activity, instead of giving everyone $10,000
per year, why don't we just cut taxes and removed red tape.

(I know that Scandinavia didn't technically have a basic income, but I still
think that this material is completely relevant and very telling).

Edit: I said "During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net public
sector job growth was ZERO". I meant private sector. Major mistake, my
apologies!

~~~
Bud
Does a 0% public sector job growth necessarily indicate a failure, in and of
itself? To me, that's not probative at all. What if Sweden had simply reached
a level where everyone who was employable and wanted to have a job, had one?

"Removing red tape" has been tried quite a bit, as a sole means of stimulating
growth. Not only has it failed over and over again, but the negative
consequences dwarf even the fantasies of growth by proponents. "Cutting taxes"
has also been tried, and has failed, over and over again.

~~~
dmix
Removing red tape has indeed been tried in America... but almost exclusively
for the benefit of already large near monopolistic corporations. It has rarely
happened to the benefit of small/medium businesses. Especially if you're
talking about deregulation that happened in the financial industry in the
2000s.

The companies that most struggle with red tape aren't mega-corps but the
smaller companies who can't afford teams of lawyers to fight through them, or
the lobbyists to implement them in their favour.

There has been very little significant deregulation in the USA in the past two
decades outside of Wall St/big corps.

Context matters, except when discussing politics it seems...

~~~
albertop
Seems like "It has rarely happened to the benefit of small/medium businesses."
and "The companies that most struggle with red tape aren't mega-corps but the
smaller companies" are contradictory. Not sure if I understand if you are for
or against removing red tape.

~~~
dmix
Politicians are the ones acting contradictory. By removing red tape for mega-
corps - for companies who already have the financial capacity to hire lawyers
and staff to deal with regulation - instead of removing red tape for the small
companies who would really benefit from it.

I believe it's clear where I stand on the matter.

------
irishcoffee
So, I'm sure this will get buried, but in the hopeful event of responses: How
does this prevent people from spending up to their means?

People who make 20k, spend to their means.

People who make 50k, spend to their means.

People who make 100k, spend to their means.

People who make 452k, spend to their means.

This is a sincere, non-snark question: people spend to their means. It's
similar to packing a bag, a person has a tendency to fill the bag, regardless
to if they need all the things they put into it. I'll dig up sources, but
people who make 452k a year, they'll tell you they're not rich. They don't
feel rich.

This. How is this resolved?

Everyone wants a vacation to an island every year, and the best things for
their kids, the best food on the table, the best cable channels. How is this
fixed?

For example (and for the record, I hold these people in the highest regard)
how do we replace trashmen, postal workers, the guy who pumps my sewage, that
dunkin donuts worker? The guy who cuts lawns, or sells firewood?

Basic income, in my opinion, is a good idea. People living without the stress
of of worrying about paying rent, I really like that idea. I have siblings,
and their life is upside-down because they can't pay the bills and keep food
on the table (I help as much as I can) how do we fix that? Would my brother
just get a nicer apartment, and eat nicer food, and still be broke? He is a
welder by trade, and makes a living. Paycheck-to-paycheck, but he makes it
work.

If he had an extra 15k a year, I am fully confident, he would still be living
paycheck-to-paycheck. He is my brother and I love him, this is his reality.

How do we fix that?

~~~
ddod
UBI isn't supposed to fix the problem of money mismanagement. If everyone was
spending up to their means, that would be a success because the economy would
be flourishing. If they were putting that money into savings, the experiment
would be a failure. UBI is designed to solve for the future economy where
human labor's value diminishes. In 20 years your brother's welding job may
still be paying but whatever job you (or your children) do on a computer will
likely be much better handled by AI. UBI is to bail you (and most of our
economy) out, not necessarily your brother.

~~~
irishcoffee
My brother _is_ most of our economy.

This was my whole point.

~~~
ddod
No, most of the US economy is service and office based.
[http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf)
(see chart 3)

------
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.)

~~~
usaar333
From my experience working with remote workers, problems tend to be bucketed
under "loss of context". The remote worker misses so many ad-hoc (e.g. lunch
with a colleague) workplace conversations that they end up knowing less about
what is going on. Time zone differences further complicate thing (misalignment
of working hours).

Secondly, and something perhaps tech could solve, is difficulty of working on
problems together. I haven't seen a good video conferencing solution that
comes close to two people in a room drawing on a whiteboard.

~~~
mjevans
Working in actual VR would do it.

Sort of like have an 'office' room of standard size and layout (no one
deviates on the placement of furniture; decorations and quality might change).

The slip on some immersive 3D thing and have an actual avatar that's mapped to
the worker's actions. This includes drawing on the virtual white board. It
probably also includes a decent face-rig and several other non-verbal
communications.

------
interesting_att
Really glad YC is pushing for research into this. This is a fascinating topic
that deserves more research. There have many points in my life where many of
my friends and I needed welfare just to purchase food. For all of us, we
experienced unbelievable amounts of shame even considering the idea. As a
result, two things happened.

i) Some of us didn't go on welfare to our detriment. Not eating = decreased
ability to be a productive citizen.

ii) Some of us had to 'over-sell' to others and to ourselves our disabilities,
out of the fear that we would be denied access to these services or be accused
that we were gaming the system. The effects of overselling these disabilities
were devastating on one's mental health.

Having a shame-free way of getting welfare could be a great thing.

------
notliketherest
When I talk with people about basic income, my gut reaction and primary
argument is that it contrasts with that fundamental human nature that's been
show time and again throughout humanity - given a guaranteed, fixed reward no
matter how much or how little you work for it, disincentivizes work. It
follows along the same lines as why government instituted communism fails. Or
why the first version of the mayflower compact failed - whatever was produced
was put into a common warehouse and all the land, buildings and end product
were communally owned.

I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is -
it's paid for by the working class) ultimately leads to the destruction of the
economy.

~~~
superuser2
>disincentivizes work

Why is this a problem? The market allocates work, the market has decided that
a large and growing number of people's work is worth $0, the market is still
producing enough to keep everyone happy and fed.

Why should someone be incentivized to work when their work has no value?

Put another way, we have made an _amazing_ collective achievement: 100% effort
from 100% of people is no longer necessary or even desirable to
maintain/improve standards of living. Life has collectively gotten much
easier, and coerced labor (yes, starvation and homelessness due to
unemployment are coercion) is no longer necessary.

~~~
alexmat
> Why is this a problem?

It incentivizes breeding. The more resources are freely available the more our
population will grow until we reach equilibrium. Although we usually overshoot
and end up with a Malthusian outcome.

"Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a
virtuous attachment is so strong, that there is a constant effort towards an
increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject
the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great
permanent amelioration of their condition".

— Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter II.

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

~~~
taurath
Here is a graph that says thats wrong:

[http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/apec324/excel_lab1/xy_plot1.png](http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/apec324/excel_lab1/xy_plot1.png)

As people get more resources, they tend to have FEWER children than those with
little resources.

~~~
alexmat
We don't know what effect basic income would have on GDP, only that it would
affect distribution of wealth.

Income equality might rise while GDP falls in a re-distributive system. High
GDP does not imply high income equality. That graph is misleading in this
context.

------
krashidov
If I am a participant in this subject and I am told that I will be receiving
Basic Income for 5 years I might act differently compared to if I was told
that I am entitled to Basic Income for the rest of my life.

The observation bias alone might motivate people to do work and strive to
achieve something with all of their time. Or, it might even cause them to lie
about the things they're working on.

It will be very interesting to see how they design the study, I think it has
to be a little bit more nuanced than "Here's 2000 dollars a month for 5 years,
bye."

~~~
lg
Yeah if it's 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day
after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that
I was working on my art?

~~~
smountcastle
Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic
income doesn't mean you won't work. I suppose there will be some who would
minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many
will continue to earn far more.

~~~
lg
If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that
would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for
a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you
might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would
look to HR would be irrelevant.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Seems to me that five years is a long time. I could work on a degree for the
first four. Or I could work on retraining myself for the first two. Or I could
just take the first six months off.

Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide
to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume
credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how
peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...

------
whybroke
I would add to the article's list of reasons why minimum income is a good idea
the very Roman purpose behind public aid: to prevent civil unrest.

And I'd second sama's mention of controlling cost of living. In addition to
universally obvious importance of it, with minimum income there is the added
possibility that prices for low end necessities could rise commensurate with
the size of the minimum guaranteed income.

A third point I'd raise is to ask about medical costs which, unlike Finland or
Canada, if this test is carried out in the US, would be a very significant
factor. If the minimum income needs to cover this too then healthy, and
generally the young may tend to have vastly more disposable income while an
unexpected illness for anyone could far exceed anything the minimum income
could hope to cover.

------
SilasX
Related to the cost of living factor: what about research on the interplay
between guaranteed income and rents? I get the impression that rents will
increase to take up most of the guaranteed amount, based on how people
allocate for living vs. discretionary expenses, but would like to see
something rigorous.

Example of the dynamic: Winston Churchill liked to give a story [1] about do-
gooders who saw that a bridge's tolls were a burden on the poor, so they
bought out the owner ... only to find that rents right afterward went up by
the exact expense of crossing the bridge twice daily.

Considering the necessity of this crossing, that was _like_ a sudden basic
income of the cost of crossing the bridge, and got eaten up by rents. But I'd
like to see something more rigorous and what can be done about that
phenomenon.

[1] ctrl-f for "bridge": [http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-
comment/winston-...](http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-
comment/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can.html)

------
TrevorJ
I wonder what basic income would do to cost of living? If everyone ends up
with x amount of guaranteed income, does the cost of living eventually rise by
the same amount across the board and basically negate it? It seems like rent-
seeking behavior would come in to play here.

~~~
jdmichal
I often have the same inclination of thought with regards to university
education and government-guaranteed student loans. If I'm a university
executive, and I know that the average student can afford $X, and I know the
average student can also receive a guaranteed $Y in student loans... Why would
I not set my price at $(X+Y) and take the full rent that I can?

~~~
soperj
Only works if every university does the same thing.

~~~
TrevorJ
According to a study be the federal reserve, it actually _is_ happening right
now. Education isn't a commodity product so this kind of pricing doesn't
require collusion between different schools.

------
Bud
Did anyone else read this post, and think, "Wow, what a dream job. What an
opportunity to actually study something in real-life with real people that
could make a fundamental difference in the evolution of humankind."

It is harder to conceive of a notion more beneficial to the fate of humans
than the notion that all humans deserve the basic essentials of life, and that
the first task of a civilized society must be to provide those essentials,
without regard for any judgements of the worthiness of individuals.

It should be assumed that everyone gets to eat and have shelter.

~~~
protomyth
I guess I did data consulting for one too many programs and read it as, "damn,
that's going to be a hard outcome to work out and the data collection is going
to be problematic. I hope they find someone who knows what their doing."

------
Mz
In my opinion, "we tried this before" and it didn't work. We didn't call it
Basic Income, but we have some historcal examples of large scale attempts to
guarantee everyone gets a share. Famous failures include communism.

I do not care how you arrange this research, it will not tell you what will
happen under real world conditions. There is plenty of instructive data from
the real world that you can look at. For example, about 2/3 of lottery winners
are bankrupt within 5 years.

When people get unearned money, most of them piss it away. "Easy come, easy
go." I have thought long and hard about this. I don't have time to write an
opus on it today, and I imagine it wouldn't be welcome anyway. Here are a
couple of things I wrote previously:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-
tried...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried-this-
before-and-its.html)

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-
conversa...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-conversation-
we-need-to-have.html)

~~~
ap22213
It seems like you're assuming that in our future there will be plenty of jobs
for average people to earn a 'living wage' (i.e. enough to pay for basic
shelter, food, clothing, education, medical treatment, etc.). What makes you
confident in that given that forecasts of economic growth show significant
stagnation and trends show increased automation of jobs?

~~~
Mz
There will be jobs, they just will require more education and/or skill than
jobs currently require. This is always true any time civilization advances.
The entry level jobs we have currently take more education and skill than jobs
took 100 or 200 years ago.

My father, who died a couple of years or so ago in his late 80s, was a high
school drop out. This was not a big deal in his day. It was not a mark of
shame or a barrier to getting a job. When Lincoln was president, the average
education level of your typical American woman was 2nd to 4th grade (IIRC).

Google stats for "big data jobs". It is expected to produce, directly or
indirectly, millions of new jobs in the next few years. Trying to fill big
data jobs is currently a challenge because of a skill short fall. It is
expected to get worse.

You don't want to get that much education? Then pan for gold. Stuff I have
read recently indicates we have only found about 5% of the gold in the earth's
crust. We are increasingly using precious metals, such as gold and silver, in
the electronics to which we have all become so very attached. Gold currently
is selling for around $1100/ounce. From what I gather, about 1/2 cup of gold
would weigh as much as a two liter bottle of soda and could be readily sold
online for about 80% of the spot price, totaling around $60k in income. It is
unlikely we will be able to substitute automation for human labor any time
soon for finding gold.

Every single human that exists creates a need for labor. In human history,
every time we successfully automate or otherwise dramatically enhance
productivity, we raise the standard of living for everyone. When we do it
stupidly and badly, we breed a situation that leads to a cycle of booms and
busts. See historical civilizations dependent upon distribution of river water
via some system in order to grow enough food. They develop a canal system and
a complex bureaucracy to run it and every few generations the complex
bureaucracy that runs it breaks down, causing the civilization to hit its bust
cycle.

Edit: Let me emphasize that: The HUMAN piece of the puzzle breaks down, and
the whole system falls apart. You are talking about intentionally trying to
create that very situation with Basic Income. Automation cannot keep working
without human maintenance.

I have no desire to live in a world where machines run everything and the last
man who knows how to write the code that runs them or debug that code or do
the repairs dies and the rest of the sheeple sit around waiting for it to fall
apart so we can rebuild civilization from the ground up like a bunch of stone
age cave dwellers.

We had better find a way to educate people and distribute the work or we are
incredibly, amazingly fucked.

------
glibgil
Experiments in dense, but attractive housing are probably the gatekeeper to
affordable housing. I don't see this talked about much. Affordable housing is
a good goal, but until it can be done in a very dense way, it cannot compete
with other schemes. One idea I have is to run genetic algorithms to create
housing schemes that would seek to maximize sunlight, and privacy. The plan
needs strong focus on sound proofing and technology to reintroduce ambient
sound when desired. The plan would also balance the exposure of inhabitance to
each other in their comings and goings and in their use of common areas.
Finally, the scheme would seek to keep public as much of the area as possible
to make it competitive for commerce and livelihood compared to other parts of
the surrounding environment.

------
marcell
I'm very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood.

The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give
every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a]

1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software
engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit
society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional income support.

2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the
cost of this program would be $3T!

3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the
current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available
government revenue against our desire to help poor people.

[a]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income),
"all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum
of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere"

~~~
aggronn
1) How is this more inefficient than our existing welfare system? Seems a lot
more efficient to give everyone money rather than spend $100M on bureaucratic
infrastructure for verification and employment tracking.

2) It benefits society because you no longer have to work to live. This
affects how you make decisions about your employment. You would be more likely
to change jobs when you're unhappy, for example. This is good.

3) Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn't there to prove
"additional income support". The system could be set up so that after basic
income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--
people making $40k wouldn't have $10k in free money to spend, because their
taxes would go up $10k a year, for example. The key here is that if they
choose not to work for some period of time, they can. That's not how I think
it ought to be implemented, but the principle is true.

4) If government handed out $10k to everyone, they could tax everyone $10k and
it would be like nothing happened. The difference in implementation would be
that the additional taxes would be progressive, while the benefits are flat.
So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were
before, but you would also receive $10k. Without a doubt, an effective basic
income would require a _more_ progressive tax structure than what we have.

5) "If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc.," not familiar with
this reference, but presumably a basic income would eliminate extreme poverty.
Do you mean like, for example, what would someone who was physically incapable
of working receive? Is the basic income enough?

~~~
ultramancool
> Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn't there to prove
> "additional income support". The system could be set up so that after basic
> income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--
> people making $40k wouldn't have $10k in free money to spend, because their
> taxes would go up $10k a year, for example.

> So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were
> before, but you would also receive $10k.

So basically as a middle class person, I don't benefit at all, I may even lose
money, but some kid who has no income and wants to live in his parents
basement gets $10k/yr for contributing nothing to society? Am I understanding
this correctly?

The upper class won't care - this is pennies to them, but this is going to
bite the middle class badly and completely change their incentives to avoiding
getting housing and living as cheaply as possible to minimize or eliminate
work.

You always have to think very carefully about the incentives you create with
something like this. This seems to create very bad incentives to me,
incentives which would have caused me to make very, very different decisions
in life drawing me away from any sort of productivity in society.

I'm not strictly against this idea, but as you've presented it, I can't see a
way this would ever be implemented, how would you sell it to the middle class?

~~~
irremediable
> So basically as a middle class person, I don't benefit at all, I may even
> lose money, but some kid who has no income and wants to live in his parents
> basement gets $10k/yr for contributing nothing to society? Am I
> understanding this correctly?

The benefit for you is that you'd be living in a better society. Hopefully,
you'd see reductions in crime, improvements in various service jobs, etc.

That kid gets $10k/year, sure, but then again _lots_ of people already have
the means to live in their parents' basements. Most of them prefer not to do
so.

However, there'll be other people getting that $10k/year. Single mothers could
spend more time with their children. More people would become educated. The
job market would become more liquid for employees, hopefully improving working
conditions.

------
jfaucett
"Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?"

I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying
sociopolitcal ideas. The problem is, its almost impossible to change the laws
necessary at a governmental level in any reasonable time scale. This is
exacerbated by the fact that you are inside a "monolithic legacy codebase" in
which you can only afford to make minor changes over many years to take you
from point A to some goal which is point B, and you still can't verify that
point B works in any practical way.

Ideally, you could have at least an entire city (population ca. 50k minimum)
where you could just try out all this stuff, and continually carry out
sociopolitical experiments. I suppose that's not feasible, but any idea that
goes in the direction of increasing iteration times and improving the
testability of ideas like this would be a good direction I think.

What do other HNers think about this?

~~~
maker1138
Hong Kong has become a Special Administrative Region of China and has it's own
justice, education, and political system (mostly). I think it would be a great
idea to have several of these regions across the us to "beta test" different
policies to see whether they would be good or bad. Changing a policy or law of
an entire nation is hard and risky; trying these things out in special
regions, where you have a known trial period, would allow much faster
innovation in the political space.

~~~
jfaucett
I don't see why we aren't doing something like this. Especially when you start
looking at how much it might cost.

Birmingham, AL has a population of 212k and a yearly budget of 390 million.
([https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America's_la...](https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America's_largest_cities))
When you consider the USA govt spent about 70 Billion on R&D in 2016
([http://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-
rd](http://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd)). That would be
about 0.5% of total R&D spending.

------
clemensley
Honestly, I don't think that people sitting around is the problem with basic
income - it's funding it.

Say you are going to give each of the 320M inhabitants of the US $10k per year
(that's about the poverty threshold). That would be a cost of $3.2 Trillion
per year, or about 50% the total government revenue (federal, state, & local
combined). I just cannot see a future where the US raises taxes by a number
that anywhere close to 50%.

Source:
[http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/current_revenue](http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/current_revenue)

~~~
corin_
Keep in mind that some of the additional tax would be funded by the basic
income received by the rich (i.e. some people would get the $10k and then pay
back $10k more in tax than they would have before, thus not gaining or losing
- and of course some people will fall on either side of that middle line).
Also, some social benefits costs would be cut, and in theory possibly also
save money on currently-needed beaurocracy.

Whether it all balances out would depend on how it was implemented and then
your subjective opinion of how it would work, my point is just that it's not
as simple as "find another $3.2trillion".

~~~
clemensley
Fair point.

It seems that in 2009, 13.2% of americans have been living under the poverty
threshold. Lets say that they make 50% of the poverty threshold on average
(don't know the number). That would be an increase of 3.3% of government
revenue. Plus the savings on bureaucracy you point to. Does not sound like the
most libertarian plan ever, but it's certainly not unrealistic.

------
pj_mukh
Fantastic. Basic income should start entering the political vernacular in a
massive way. Even in the short term, it seems like a more elegant solution to
the progressive lefts "lets build giant infrastructure" plan.

I'm looking forward to this research answering the basic revenue calculus. How
much of the required spending can be supported by dismantling the current
welfare infrastructure? How much would general productivity need to increase
(and be maintained) to make sure the tax revenue can support this? Is there
any effect of this on capital investment (the lifeblood of SV)?

------
davidw
Things got fiddled a bit here with the comments, but this is my response to
"how can we increase prosperity for everyone?", although it's probably more a
political problem than a startup one.

Maybe it's just me that has noticed it in the past few years, but "fixing
housing in the US" is looming large on my list of things to improve.

It's not just San Francisco - the same debates are playing out in places like
Boulder, or even here in Bend.

------
metaphorm
sama asked:

> Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

good financial services for very poor people in developed countries.

the basic financial services that middle class and wealthy people have access
to such as checking accounts, savings accounts, retail brokerages for
purchasing investing vehicles (stocks, bonds, etfs, etc.), access to consumer
credit that does not have usurious rates and predatory practices, tax filing
assistance, direct deposit of paychecks, automated scheduled bill payments,
access to in-network or no-fee ATMs, ability to build up good credit history
and have a high FICA score, etc.

all of these things that the middle and upper classes totally take for grant
as basic infrastructure necessary for modern life are things that very poor
people are almost completely shut out of. this is a HUGE driver of persistent
poverty in already poor communities. this is one of the things that makes
climbing up out of poverty almost impossible for so many people.

a startup attempting to solve these problems would have to be willing to
experiment with totally new business models that do not directly rely on
exploitation of the customers to generate profits. it might be a lower margin
business than, for example, commercial banking. it would be a great social
good though, and it might even be possible to make a profitable business out
of it too.

edit: expanding on my point

an important component of sama's query is "increase prosperity for everyone".
how does providing financial services for the very poor help everyone? simple:
it increases demand at the base of the economy. very poor people have almost
no discretionary spending money and often end up as net drains on local
economies, taking in money from government assistance programs while not
contributing back to the economic growth of their communities.

if the poorest people become less poor they begin to buy things with their
newly available discretionary spending money.

------
cryoshon
Re: what startups can do to increase prosperity for everyone:

Find ways of destroying harmful institutions by replacing them with better
ones-- a perfect example to pursue is the institution of health insurance in
the USA, which is explicitly harmful to people, inefficient, inhumane, and
completely entrenched in multiple other institutions. Find a way to get people
cheaper and better care, and they'll flock to you.

There's other ways, of course, but the gist is that rather than focusing on
relatively irrelevant problems (getting takeout easier, booking flights
easier, etc), startups could choose to tackle actually difficult problems such
as political corruption, exploitation of the poor, existential angst, etc.
These issues aren't traditionally simple to monetize.

------
mbesto
This is awesome. This is my favorite interpretation of a basic income and how
it might fit in a capitalist society:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM)

~~~
neuromancer2701
Removing minimum wage is a very important aspect because it allows teens to
get experience early. Nothing kills teenage employment rates better than a
20$/hr mandate.

~~~
soperj
Or just do what Australia does and have a different minimum for teen agers...

------
gizmo
Regarding startups and prosperity for everyone.

If "everyone" means "all US citizens" then startups can help increase
transparency in government. It's much easier to figure out who to vote for
when there's a clear picture of somebody's track record and who their
political allies and funders are. Everybody should want this, regardless of
political persuasion. If massive data gathering can't be stopped (and it looks
that way) then the least we demand is real transparency. Without that there
can be no accountability. Most political information people come into contact
with is disinformation or shameless propaganda by some special interest. It is
getting completely out of hand, but there's no obvious solution.

If "everyone" means "every person in the world", then we need startups to
fight for sustainable energy and universal education. All scientific papers
must be freely available to everybody in the world (few exceptions, e.g. how
to manufacture anthrax can stay secret). Music and literature should be
available to everybody, preferably at no cost. A single college textbook costs
a month's salary in many parts of the world. That's just cruel.

There isn't much overlap between things that are super important for society
and things that are profitable. The civil rights movement wouldn't work as a
for-profit venture and future civil rights movements will be no exception.
Often enough people who have contributed the greatest value to society never
benefited from it personally. Duchesne or Flemming didn't get rich from their
discovery of penicillin but the contribution to mankind is immense. In
contrast the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation -- with their many billions --
struggle to make a huge impact. To really improve the quality of life across
the globe a social revolution of some sort is needed.

------
Spooky23
The problem with basic income is that people need purpose, not charity. Look
at the success of programs in Africa that give people the ability to make a
living, not a bag of rice. One particularly moving story was about a group
that got foot-powered water pumps into the hands of subsistence farmers, who
subsequently were able to send their kids to school.

At one point, the core purpose of monetary policy and central banking was full
employment. Now, it seems to be stability and productivity. The political
system is too corrupt to pivot -- but the private sector can, because untapped
potential represents lost customers.

I think we need to figure out how to empower people. We have all of these
underserved communities that suffer mostly from hopelessness. How do we
empower a handyman in the inner city to build a sustainable business that
enjoys his neighbors? How do we bring vitality to a rural community
marginalized by the death of farming and mills?

~~~
clavalle
> The problem with basic income is that people need purpose, not charity.

> I think we need to figure out how to empower people.

I don't think anything you've said is incompatible with something like basic
income.

What could be more empowering than knowing your basic needs will be taken care
of? From that position of strength you can negotiate with others based on
mutual benefit rather than avoiding the consequences of not meeting your basic
needs for survival. You must be enticed into a transaction rather than coerced
no matter how circumspect that coercion.

If people needed to be forced to add value to the world through the threat of
starvation or homelessness HN wouldn't exist. Why would people with means
continue transacting? I don't believe the poor are much different, they will
nurture their potential and provide what they can to the world because the
trade leaves them better off.

~~~
Spooky23
You're missing the point and reading thing that I didn't write. People don't
want your charity. They want a chance to earn a living.

When you give people everything they need to subsist, but nothing to do, it
doesn't give them "freedom". It creates dependency.

Nobody in Silicon Valley has basic income. They have ripe opportunity for
productive employment. That's the safety net that facilitates risk.

~~~
clavalle
>Nobody in Silicon Valley has basic income.

Savings, financial support structures through their family, direct funding,
and skills they can easily turn into funds. These are not basic income but
they have the same effect: they allow the freedom to bargain from a position
of strength without worrying about starving or going homeless or other basic
needs unpleasantness. They have breathing room to create. And they do.

Imagine a world where, in order to create a new business, someone had to enter
a walled city, give up all savings, were forbidden to take money from outside
sources and must work full time (at least) at the same time in order to earn
their daily rations of food and a bed while they are at it. That is the world
the poor live in, more or less. The walled city is the planet Earth.

You mention dependency but you forgot the qualifier: on government. The poor
live in dependency right now -- they are dependent on their employer to live
week to week. They work, not to better their situation, but to keep from
losing what little they have. It is the illusion of freedom.

You mention charity, but my position has nothing to do with charity and making
people comfortable just because. It is about putting people in a position
where their every transaction, if we assume they are rational, are guaranteed
to create value. That helps all of us.

It is about giving people a hard floor to stand on. They will find things to
do, just like most people with money and resources find a way to add value to
the world -- because it improves their situation.

We don't need to worry about keeping people busy...they can figure out for
themselves what is best for them and the world doesn't improve your situation
unless you improve the world. I trust they'll figure that out.

------
maker1138
One of the best ways to increase prosperity for everyone is to make living
more efficient/affordable. Look at the average American budget from 2013[0].
The top of the list is housing. Figure out how to make housing cheaper and
more resource efficient and you could lower both housing cost and utility
cost, potentially saving people hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Other top items would be transportation and taxes. A $10k safe and energy
efficient vehicle would be a great first step.

Though it may be unpopular in some circles, the fact is taxation is one of the
least efficient ways of allocating capital. You have administration costs,
fraud, waste, and abuse. If we lower the cost of living for everyone, we can
lower taxes as well and allow that capital to be invested more efficiently.

[0] [http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-
budget](http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget)

------
sebii
There is non-profit startup in Berlin trying to do this, they mainly fund
themselves by raising the money from the crowd. It's a lottery system where
one can win 1000€ per month for one year, which in most parts of Germany gets
you somewhere. They already funded 29 people analyze and blog about who won.
Most people actually didn't do dramatic life changes, which also could be
because it's just one year.

Warning German: [https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/start](https://www.mein-
grundeinkommen.de/start)

~~~
mattkrisiloff
It's a big reason we want to do it for 5 years -- things may look different in
the longer term.

~~~
semafour
Is five years long enough to get a real reaction? Unless somebody is on the
verge of retirement, and they want to keep working after the experiment, they
must consider staying in the job pool or have difficulty getting hired in five
years. To see how people would react to a government-provided basic income,
which would presumably be fore life, the study may have to emulate that more
perfectly.

Nevertheless, I'm very excited by this project and seeing what comes of it.

~~~
entwife
Does the basic income prevent people from doing work? Or from doing work they
hate?

A correctly designed study will attempt to teach the participants to (1) have
basic spending/expenses that match their income (2) procure the basic income
from already-available sources (e.g. food stamps, subsidised health care,
social security...) and (3) form income-pooling groups that provide/insure a
basic income for their members. All three have already been done at a small
scale. 100s of people in the United States currently practice #3, e.g.
Federation of Egalitarian Communities. 1000s of people practice #2, e.g. Puna
Hawaii or your local trailer park.

I think basic income would have the effect of insurance, to allow individuals
to take bigger risks and follow their dreams more.

------
a3n
If there were a basic income, I might quit my job and look for a new one full
time, rather than looking in my spare time, increasing the chances that I
would find a better fit between me and the new company. There must be some
utility or public good in that.

That might also provide some needed competition for lower wage/skill jobs,
since they'll have to compete with scraping by on basic income. As it is now
low wage employees are disposable and disrespected; "flexible" schedule means
something different at Best Buy than at my current engineering job.

------
iMuzz
"Our idea is to give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5
year period"

In order to get realistic information for how people will behave / feel with a
basic income we should seriously consider dropping the '5 year period' and
extending it for the remainder of their lives.

Personally, knowing that I will have to start working again in 5 years to
support myself would drastically change how I choose to spend my time over the
next 5 years.

Also, props to Sam / YC for this initiative.

------
lauraku
I am surprised that it's for only 1 researcher though. The data on startup
founders seems to encourage 2 or more people to share the burden and have
someone to more explicitly bounce ideas off of. It would seem to be the case
that fundamental research like this would also benefit from the cofounder type
setup.

~~~
mattkrisiloff
The researcher we choose will be fully a part of YCR / YC. He or she will be
able to bounce ideas off us at any point, and we will help out however is
requested.

------
nraynaud
I hope It's not coming back to bite me in the ass to say that, but I have been
slacking and collecting unemployment benefits in the last few years.

During this time I have re-kindled my interest in mechanics and electronics,
bought and changed the electronics of a CNC router, learned to use it, learned
a bit of woodworking, created the control software and tool path planning
system (
[https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode](https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode)
). I have helped a guy on the internet with a laser cutting software, I have
created an easy captcha breaker, played with Cypress PSOC MCUs (it's the
gateway drugs to FPGAs), started a project that uses Polymer Dispersed Liquid
Crystals (hint: you can control the 70V stuff with the parts destined for
vacuum fluorescent display). And I learned a few techniques:

\- CNC cutting vinyl and using it as a stencil for painting or sandblasting

\- isolation milling of PCBs

\- PCB etching

\- CNC made wood inlays

\- using a lot of glues

\- learned a bit of Ember.js, lots of Chrome APIs

\- a bit of mold making

\- parametric mechanical CAD design

Now, I have accepted a job offer and should start next Monday, so I guess all
those projects and learnings are over, but that was a good ride.

~~~
kdamken
Question - how did you collect benefits for so long? The two times I was able
to collect, the max was 6 months.

I agree with you 100%. The time I spent on unemployment was very spiritually
fulfilling and really helped with my career. I got into running, learned how
to produce music, and taught myself to code.

~~~
nraynaud
I had one year without benefits, and the rest is because there is such a high
unemployment country and such a high ratio unemployed/agency employees, that
they can't really control anything.

------
harryh
$10,000 * US_POPULATION ~= $3.2T ~= The total annual tax revenue of the US
federal government.

Something to keep in mind when discussing this topic.

~~~
samstave
But that number is misleading. I have a spouse and three children. Does that
mean we all will get 10K/yr?

I have had a different thought on this in the past; Every child born should
have $10K put into an account in their name on the day they are born. It will
gain interest and grow until they are 18, then they get the money. And as an
adult after 21, they are taxed at some rate to pay back the initial 10K that
will then be deposited into the account of some other new baby.

~~~
bobby_9x
What will stop people from having multiple kids, just to get the $10K/child
windfall?

~~~
jdmichal
Because the cost of raising a child to 18 years of age far outweighs the $10k
+ interest?

------
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.

~~~
ctdonath
Supply is limited. Always. Increase demand enough, and there MUST be an
increase in "friction" somehow to limit demand to match supply; otherwise,
supply runs out fast favoring "first come first served" and suffering waste
while "real need" goes unfulfilled. Raising prices is the most natural and
appropriate (if arguably imperfect) way to apply such friction, generally
equalizing the cost value to the buyer with the reward value to the seller.

~~~
phaus
I understand the argument. What I'm asking about, is whether or not it would
negate the positive effects of a basic income. The people who argue against
the idea of a basic income often use this argument as evidence that it can't
possibly work.

~~~
ctdonath
The whole point of basic income is to reduce the friction for obtaining
necessities ... which is increasing demand for a limited supply. Demand
increases, supply either exhausts rapidly or finds some other way of
increasing friction - usually by increasing prices, stabilizing right about
back where we started but with higher prices.

In addition, money itself is of limited supply. Reducing the friction for
obtaining money results in increased demand for that limited supply of money.
Demand increases, supply either exhausts rapidly[1] or finds some other way of
increasing friction - usually by increasing prices (inflation), stabilizing
right about back where we started but with higher prices.

[1] - "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's
money."

------
abawany
* In my opinion, the US healthcare system is a horrifying impediment to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. To answer your question: I wish startups would disrupt the healthcare industry in the same way Lyft/Uber disrupted transportation, AirBnb did for short term rentals, and Amazon did for online purchasing. These are controversial examples but all I ask of you is to go back a month before these respective services were announced and examine the convenience factor of your life vs. what it became after the existence of these services.

While I liked how refreshing Health Sherpa was to use compared to
healthcare.gov of the early years, I think a more fundamental disruption of
the healthcare industry is needed. All the various middlemen with their high
overheads, the plethora of paper pushers, coders (what a travesty of a fine
word), etc. Some examples of healthcare niches that are ripe for disruption
include supplies for disabled individuals, building provider networks not
beholden to the Hades of the regular insurance industry, enabling medical
tourism, etc.

------
endriju
Basic income introduces a few drawbacks:

\- talented people will not need to do consulting or daytime jobs to support
their startups or side-project, which can lead to them living in a bubble

\- there will always be people who spend all their income on gambling, drugs,
sex, whatever - with basic income they just have more cash to waste (although
this could be controlled somehow)

\- low-skilled jobs aren't going anywhere soon - how do we want to motivate
people to do jobs like garbage collection or road maintenance - this is
already a problem in countries with exuberant social systems like France

~~~
maxerickson
Garbage collection doesn't need to be a low paid job. 1 garbage truck can
service thousands of homes with just 1 driver (and bins that are designed to
be grabbed by a mechanism on the truck). So you could pay a fantastic wage
with a very modest contribution per home.

------
meric
_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.

~~~
api
The central problem for a long time has been that central banks have done this
with the effect being rising prices (or at least prevention of deflation)
almost everywhere _except wages_.

------
FrankyHollywood
A lot of people see problems in getting basic income funded. But is there is a
simple solution :)

Generate the money, just print it!

Everyone on earth will get an equal quantity of money, every month.

Now this money can be used in two different ways.

1) Buy natural resources

2) Buy services

This distinction is important:

When somebody provides a service, like fixing your bike he gets money and can
keep it.

When you buy a 'natural resource', like wood, corn or oil the money must be
destroyed.

What I hope to accomplish this way is several things:

\- Equal chances for everyone, everybody can buy the same amount of natural
resources on earth.

\- Destroying the money keeps the total money amount balanced. Natural
resources are limited so a limited amount of money seems fair.

\- The system makes adding value to the world profitable. You are stimulated
to be creative and do something for someone else!

\- Perhaps the total amount of money will increase. This is not bad perse,
rich people will get less rich. But everyone always has enough money to live a
good life.

This is the basic idea. How this should work in practice needs lots of work,
but I'm really curious how you guys think about this!

~~~
maker1138
This is a terrible idea. Something similar to it has been tried dozens of time
in the past with disastrous results.

[http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/working...](http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/workingpaper-8.pdf)

~~~
FrankyHollywood
tnx for the article, very interesting! Hyperinflation is definitly not what I
would opt for. Still I'd like to have a system where every earth citizen has
equal rights to earths resources and one where people who actually make the
world a better place to live in should be rewarded somehow.

If you think about it, our monetairy system, salaries, social wellfare, taxes.
Although not perfect, we kind of have such a system allready :)

------
samstave
I want to add the following idea, which I have mentioned here on HN several
times:

I humbly submit this as my solo-founder, idea-only HN application;

The Standard Pantry.

The standard pantry is literally just that - a pantry of a set of basic
ingredients that go along with a range of standard recipes and a weekly menu
schedule.

Provide this standard pantry as a partially subsidized offering and teach
people how to make a set menu from the basics. Certain components used are
refilled at a regular interval as a part of the standard pantry - other
ingredients will still need to be purchased, perhaps in conjunction with basic
income.

The goal is to help people cook, themselves, more healthy and affordable
meals. and overall increase their quality of life.

\---

When I was first learning the basics of cooking from my grandmother, she used
to be able to tell me to the penny the cost of each meal we cooked. How some
dishes were "$1.43 per person" etc...

It drove home to me the value of cooking and not wasting food.

Cooking is therapy as well. eating well / better is good for every aspect of
life.

~~~
dublinben
It can be hard to cook a proper meal for yourself when you work three jobs,
don't have a full kitchen in your home, move on a regular basis, etc.

If only it were so easy.

------
DoubleExpat
Basic income exists already in several European countries. For example in
Germany you get for half a year after loosing a job about 75% of your last
salary. After six months it degrades but you will always be supplied with a
home, food, cloths and some little money to spend.

In France you get paid for two years after loosing your job. In Denmark I
think it is three or four year even. Enough time to start three or four
startups.

Would be interesting to look into the data of these countries.

~~~
tajen
In France, 2 years at 80% of your original salary (unemployment benefits). AND
after that, you get the basic income ("RSA" +APL) of 650€/month (which is 60%
of minimum salary, or 40% of median income). The amount varies depending on
your housing situation and city. Source: I was on RSA for a year when I
created my startup.

------
bcheung
Thomas Paine wrote an excellent essay on this concept back in the day. It is
worth reading:

[https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html](https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html)

You might want to look into Georgism and Geolibertarianism as well.

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

The basic premise of all these is that land and natural resources can not be
owned. If you want to use them you have to rent / buy rights to them. That
rent goes into a basic fund that is then used for basic income. The basic
argument is that land belongs to everyone, so everyone should get an equal
share of the rent from the land.

~~~
jqm
I believe that is the solution to the problem and I'm not sure why others
don't see it.

Stop taxing labor. It's counterproductive. Tax what really does belong to
everyone... the land and raw materials.

This approach (in addition to more morally just in my estimation) would have
the added benefit of built in environmentalism. There would be a financial
incentive to do more with less, to conserve and to recycle.

~~~
usrusr
I certainly see why the idea of putting the whole tax burden on land and raw
materials could be appealing to people who are making software. It's difficult
to make a compelling argument for change when one is so clearly on the winning
side of it (which I dare to assume, given the HN demographic).

~~~
jqm
Agreed on benefit to the group. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't also be a
vast improvement for society in general.

Because one stands to gain from an idea doesn't in and of itself make the idea
a bad one.

------
marknutter
If you want to see basic income in action, look no further than the various
Native American tribes who operate casinos throughout the country. The results
are not pretty [1].

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21639547-how-
cas...](http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21639547-how-cash-casinos-
makes-native-americans-poorer-slots-and-sloth)

~~~
wstrange
Perhaps there are other social factors at play.

~~~
marknutter
I have a feeling this would be the excuse a lot of people would make if basic
income didn't end up improving conditions for the poor.

------
wtvanhest
This research is an awesome thing that YC could give to the world.

I do have a few very specific, big concern though:

>We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally
distributed.

In order for this research to having meaning, we would need to see how the
costs of things, especially real estate prices are impacted. One argument
against basic income is that it would inflate the prices of basic goods and
provide no real benefit. It would be worth spending a lot to figure that out.

Also...

> 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not
> being able to eat as a way to motivate people.

I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for a
very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove this.

~~~
hellodevnull
>I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for
a very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove
this.

You could look to many European countries for an answer. The unemployed
receive welfare, now tell me how many of those are still motivated enough to
do anything when there's no fear of hunger. Are these people happy receiving
enough welfare to live a modest life, or do they strive to do more?

~~~
wtvanhest
I have no idea. That is exactly why someone needs to research it. Fortunately
for all of us, YC has stepped in to provide some funding for the research.

My gut tells me that if societies could work with basic income, someone would
have figured it out a long time ago. There have been a lot of societies after
all and people have tried a lot of different things. On the other hand, my gut
is wrong sometimes. I think it is super interesting that we may get some well
thought out research about this that we can hopefully use to do more research
and maybe someday come up with a better system.

------
finance-geek
@sama - since so many people here are in The Bay Area, i'll give the obvious
answer for the region -- __high density housing. __I 'm from NYC and we
support a lot more housing in a much smaller area. This is accomplished by
stacking upwards towards the sky. I appreciate there are earthquake concerns,
but I also understand that many of the barriers for high density housing are
political and social.

I'll bet many problems in the Bay Area would be resolved with high density
housing. A selfish list: shorter commutes (--> more time with family), lower
rents (--> more people willing to move here --> fewer developer "shortages"),
less cars on the road, less pollution.

~~~
sama
Yep--I'd love it if we could fund some high-density housing work. I also think
it's a (for me, other people prioritize different things) good way to live.

------
codingdave
I'm not sure providing basic income for a group of people for 5 years is a
valid experiment. That group would still need to improve themselves because
their money will be gone in 5 years, and they would then need to have built
enough of their lives to get a job or be self-financed. The other flaw is that
they will be a unique group, not part of a population who all gets the same
basic income, so their lifestyle choices will be dictated personally, whereas
if everyone had basic income, culture itself would have more impact on
choices.

It sounds like a great idea to spend time and energy researching this... I
just don't think the description as posted is going to hit the mark.

------
loueed
The top reasons I support the Basic Income concept: 1. It provides a safety
net for the most vulnerable in a society. 2. As automation and wealth
inequality increase we will need a system in place to deal with mass
unemployment. 3. Not being accepted at a job offer can affect the mental
health of a person. Basic income gives people time to re-educate. 4. If it
works for the royal family it can work for all of us.
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/basic-i...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/basic-
income-royal-family-living-wage-economy).

------
astockwell
I think a critical piece of Basic Income being successful is being able to
count on it __UNTIL DEATH __. Unless folks can trust 100% that when they grow
old (and unable to be as productive) they can still live "without the fear of
not being able to eat", they're not going to buy into the system in the way
that everyone hopes they will.

------
miguelrochefort
Human maintenance is inexpensive.

Give every person:

\- a "capsule"-style room (2m x 1m x 1m)

\- a set of merino wool clothes (washed weekly)

\- a pair of shoes

\- a meal a day (1500 calories, high fat, low carb)

\- unlimited drinkable water

\- a weekly body maintenance (shower, nail clipping, hair trimming, mouth
cleaning, ...)

\- a bi-annual physical exam (weight, urine analysis, blood analysis, scan,
eye exam, ...)

\- a portable computer / tablet / VR headset (on demand)

\- access to public spaces (indoor and outdoor)

Basically, this would cost a person about $200/month (all included). You would
own nothing, but also have nothing to maintain or worry about (other than your
mind).

The ONLY thing that stops this from happening, is the government and its
regulations.

~~~
unethical_ban
The idea is interesting, but to call 2m x 1m x 1m anything but a coffin or a
bed-in-a-box or a closet would be disingenuous. It's certainly not a "room".

Another point: Is anything actually stopping this? If a municipal government
wanted to provide all of this to its residents, or even a magnate, I don't
think anything stops it.

~~~
miguelrochefort
I don't care what size the room is when I sleep. A bed is for sleeping, or
passive entertainment. This doesn't require more than 2x1x1.

The government and cities have restriction concerning living spaces. I am not
allowed to live in a tiny house, I can't rent an appartment that's smaller
than a certain size. I wish I could pay $100/month for just a bed, a sink, a
power outlet, wifi and controlled climate (21 degree celcius).

~~~
unethical_ban
Honest question: Is this nationwide? Or is this regional?

------
murbard2
Once again, the discussion about the basic income is framed as "would people
work or sit on their ass". This is a red herring. People receive free stuff
all the time, from nature, from technology. In general, free things do not
make people worse off, it's just more widely discussed, as are instances of
men biting dogs.

What people end up doing on a basic income is far less relevant than what
people end up _not_ doing due to the taxation burden of funding a basic
income. It's telling that the post contains no mention whatsoever of studying
the impact of the taxation.

------
grandalf
This is very interesting. I recall the first time I heard of a basic income
proposal... Milton Friedman proposes it, calling it a "negative tax" in his
book Capitalism and Freedom.

Some kind of welfare state is always going to be necessary, so the ideal
proposal creates an incentive landscape that is both humane and also nudges
citizens toward improving skills and working hard.

This is how we'd design a video game if we wanted to encourage socially
responsible behavior. It's a silly accident of history that we haven't managed
to do that in the real world.

~~~
DeBraid
+1 for Milton Friedman who almost 50 years ago described a negative income tax
as the _Revolutionary Subsidy_.

Basic formula for negative income tax is to apply tax rates on the basis of
median income. Friedman offers maximum of 50% of median income as the largest
possible subsidy.

Assume median income of $50,000. Joe Smith earns $30,000 and therefore has
negative income of $20k (median income - actual income). Joe would then
receive a negative income tax of 50% his total negative income, or $10,000.
The sum of his earned income + negative income tax = $40,000 / year.

More here: [https://github.com/DeBraid/investing-
notes/blob/master/negat...](https://github.com/DeBraid/investing-
notes/blob/master/negative-income-tax.md)

------
Tycho
Today I was thinking about the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing. That's his
theory from the book Outliers (which I haven't read) which argues that to
become a true expert in something requires 10,000 hours of practice.

Now, say I wanted to become an expert in programming. To the point where I was
an elite 10x developer. If I quit my job and lived off my savings, I could
conceivably work on programming 100 hours per week. So after ten weeks I'd
have 1000 hours, and after 100 weeks I'd have my 10,000. So that's two years
or so at a minumum.

But living off savings for two years would be incredibly costly. Working full
time would let me squeeze in say 20 hours a week, so I'd now take 10 years to
reach the golden 10,000 hours or experience. If I cut down to a part time job,
it would take 20 years.

I think the latter two are unrealistic because they take so long. The 100 hour
per week option is more of a possibility. With universal basic income,
everyone would have the opportunity. If lots of people pulled it off, the
productivity gains for society would be enormous.

Obviously there's lots of people in society who have this sort of spare time
and simply do not use it. However I think there's an argument that the people
most likely to achieve this 10,000 hours goal are people who are gainfully
employed and wouldn't pursue it without some sort of income support.

~~~
adg
A lot of people think Gladwell created the 10,000 hours theory, but he merely
popularized it. The original research comes from K. Anders Ericsson. Here's a
link to the original paper, which is actually quite accessible, if you're
interested:
[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf)

------
scotty79
All of Silicon Valley should chip in and fund Basic Income for all SF. It
would quickly become blatantly obvious that all bonus money would get sucked
in by landlords.

Basic income yes, but not without progressive tax on owned real estate that
could curb rent seeking behavior of large property owners.

------
jpmcglone
What if some companies experimented with basic income? I mean, sure, people
working there are probably already getting paid pretty well, and 'basic
income' at that point might just seem like a small bonus to their salary, but
what if it was implemented like we implemented life insurance? Hear me out:

So, you work at Company X. You and one person of your choice are now entitled
to basic income. It will come as a separate check, paid for by the company.
You can put your spouse, your family member, or a friend--etc. as a
beneficiary of the basic income, or choose nobody at all and miss out on this
"free money".

That person would have to agree to accept the money of course, and the check
will be written directly to them, not you (you are not a proxy).

One main difference between this and an actual implementation of basic income
is that these individuals will only receive the basic income as long as you
work at Company X (unless, for some reason, the Company agrees to continue the
program beyond your employment).

Another difference is that it's linked to the success and failures of this
company, instead of the successes and failures of society as a whole (the
latter seems less risky).

Anyway, I'm posting this more as a prompt.. What if? Do you think it's a
reasonable experiment for a company to run? I know big names like Google and
Facebook have some interesting perks, so why not basic income for all your
employees plus 1 person of their choice, paid for by a flat % of everyone's
income at the company?

~~~
Chinjut
As you already noted, this doesn't seem much like basic income (as payment
regardless of employment is the sine qua non of basic income). This just seems
like an augmented salary, slightly unusually paid out.

~~~
jpmcglone
Semantics. Isn't that all basic income is? That money is coming out of the
pockets of people making income. That income is coming from the pockets of
employers.

------
dmix
Canada has demonstrated that (single payer) public health insurance works
better than America's current public/private model while our taxes are
comparable to living in California. Yet the US political system has yet to
even be close to adopting it. Data doesn't always translate to political
persuasion unfortunately.

I'd expect Canada to adopt basic income before the US does as well and
possibly provide the data this study is looking for on a much larger and
contextually relevant scale.

------
legohead
Not exactly research, but reading The Culture Series by Iain Banks [1] has
caused me to give a lot of personal thought on the subject. When AI is
advanced enough to dominate everything and humans are left to just do
whatever, what will they do, and will they be happy? That's not the focus of
the series, just a side effect.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series)

~~~
cryoshon
Yes, The Culture Series has informed my political thought quite intensely as
well-- I only heard of it via HN about a year ago.

"Money is a sign of poverty" is the thought that sticks with me the most. Why
bother having a currency for resource distribution if resources are vast and
there is no benefit to conspicuous consumption?

People in the Culture rightly view money as an abstract type of coercion, and
are abhorred by the ability to force people to do things that they don't want
to do via monetary incentives.

------
DanBC
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

Gamify budgeting. I'm on a low income (UK sort-of disability benefits) and
I've got a budget set up, but I don't set aside anything. I should, and I
should be able to.

I'm more than happy to describe my experiences of claiming "employment and
support allowance (work related activity group)" (and the transition from
Incapacity benefit to ESA-WRAG; and the difficulties of working while on this
benefit.) AMAA.

~~~
ASinclair
YNAB gamified my budgeting in a sense. I've found it keeps me motivated.
Though their new web app needs some work.

------
c_moscardi
A few good ones here - another really interesting, current initiative is Bolsa
Família, a Brazilian assistance program that functions similarly to a basic
income subsidy - the main difference is that it requires families to
demonstrate up-to-date immunizations and good school attendance rates for
children.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia)

~~~
gcb0
and since it was put in place by the intellectual left, there are tons of
papers (most in Portuguese) about it.

the one I'd recommend is an actual book "vozes do bolsa família".

message me if you want more info on this. wife does a phd related to this
topic.

------
jakeogh
It's inevitable that the threat of withholding 'basic income' will be used to
modify behavior. Didn't pay your fine? Didn't do your taxes? Didn't take the
shot? Post "radical" comments on the internet? On the no-fly list? On the no-
drive list? Don't have a gov-issued InternetID™? Don't like robots enforcing
law? No soup for you. Just wait until China couples it with it's human scoring
system.

------
DocFeind
I would very much like to help with this. Is there a way to contact someone
beyond the application? There is no way to provide what I can show in that
fashion, but speaking could glean a tale most would find impossible. It's a
safe bet I can provide a perspective from more angles into the concept than
most if not nearly all.

Be it as the researcher, or an advisor in the truth of the real American
demographics, that have next to no chance at success. Few topics ignite a
passion in me as much as those surrounding this.

Other than the lifestyle truly rich, I have lived the life of the rest. From
barrios then ghettos, homelessness to youth prison, day laborer to small
business then tech startup success... In literally every corner of the nation
as most every caste... With only an 8th grade education to begin with, a dash
of 90s electronics tech school, and self taught for all the rest.

I want to help, just let me know how to explain why, away from public eyes. I
make this request, to tell the not for public knowledge story of the rest.
Then leave it for you, to allow us, to figure out where to go next.

------
chuckschnitzel
I think the premise of this is wrong.

1\. It paints an idealistic picture of the state:

> It’s true that we have systems in place to give people > resources, but the
> bureaucracy and qualification > requirements make it a very imperfect
> approximation of what > most people mean when talking about a basic income.

I'd suggest to ask why there is this bureaucracy in the first place. I'd
suggest it does its job perfectly well.

2\. It paints an idealistic picture of the capitalist economy:

> I think it’s good to start studying this early. 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.

Machines do not destroy jobs. The social purpose for which they are used -
profit - makes and destroys job. Put differently, I'd suggest to ask why this
economy produces mass poverty when it gets easier to produce stuff.

I recommend [https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/what-wrong-free-
mone...](https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/what-wrong-free-money/)

------
cousin_it
My short-term worry about basic income is that it'll end up bidding up the
prices for goods that poor people buy, especially the rent. I won't be
surprised if most of the basic income eventually goes to the landlords. IMO
the right solution is to get the government involved in distributing certain
goods, not just handing out money to buy them. The state could guarantee free
housing, food, healthcare, education and pensions for everyone, on top of
basic income for spending money. The USSR managed that with a fraction of the
resources.

My long-term worry about basic income is that people have a need to be needed
by society and it won't go away easily. I don't know a good way to solve that
completely, short of reengineering humanity. In the short term we could get
away with making the government pay companies for employing people (the
payment should be lower than the salary, but maybe not by much). That could be
a nice supplement to basic income.

~~~
alkonaut
I think the key is to start from a welfare state that is the same size as the
Basic Income system. That is, you have a tax funded system that pays for
paternal leave, pensions, unemployment benefits, daycare subsidies, food
stamps, and all other types of transfers.

 _After_ that you make a transition to a basic income system, with a very
small change in total transfers (e.g. 0-20%). This is exactly what would
happen in for example Finland, where proposals have pretty wide political
support now.

~~~
jamesblonde
Strange that the article made no mention of Finland. Probably because it's
playing to a domestic audience.

------
cs702
_" We’re looking for one researcher who wants to work full-time on this
project for 5 years as part of YC Research. We’d like someone with some
experience doing this kind of research, but as always we’re more interested in
someone’s potential than his or her past. Our idea is to give a basic income
to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period, though we’re flexible on
that and all aspects of the project—we are far from experts on this kind of
research. We’d be especially interested in a combination of selecting people
at random, and selecting people who are driven and talented but come from poor
backgrounds. We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or
nationally distributed."_

This 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.

------
Futurebot
I'm so happy to see this kind of forward-looking work. The writing is on the
wall with the constellation of automation, inequality, free agent nation/gig
economy, the Precariat, the end of lifetime employment, and the desire for
greater labor fluidity (on both sides of the table.) Taken together, these
things make the GBI an incredibly important think to start thinking about
right now. The fact that a prestigious organization like YC is interested in
it is a hopeful sign / leading indicator.

My ideas for making a GBI possible: [https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-
missing-piece-in-the-basic...](https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-missing-
piece-in-the-basic-income-discussion-4b0646cad7e9#.tq5tnqmrg)

Short: figure out how to make essentials (food, housing, education, health
care) _cheap_. Obvious, but thinking about how to get there is critical if for
a GBI to ever happen.

------
joslin01
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

Startups as a whole can do nothing -- it's like asking "what can car companies
do to increase prosperity?" except that would be a little more reasonable
given the amount of resources and relative free-time those companies have.

In startup land, you typically don't even have a sustainable business let
alone vast amount of resources lying around to fix the world's problems. They
cannot be concerned with something this vague.

What they can do is work on the correct problems that will put them in a
position to make a legitimate societal impact down the road. Even better if
they work on problems that is directly correlated to society's well-being.

You mentioned food. If a startup could compete with the likes of Monsanto, but
wasn't run by a bunch of scumbags, they might be able to create such a rich
company that it starts shipping food crates free of charge to places in need.
This depends entirely upon the kind of person running the company.

Since I respect that you have to view startups in the aggregate, I would
probably turn around and ask you, what can you do to fund better startups by
better people with long-term Do No Harm terms? The terms might even be
bullshit like "You will do everything in your power to help the world rather
than just helping yourself." It wouldn't be something you hold up in court,
but it would be a major internet foul to find out "Super Rich CEO" signed
those terms and "Super Rich CEO" was found being immoral. With the leader's
reputation at stake, you might have a chance at nurturing Good Guy CEOs.

At any rate, startups have enough to worry about. If you want to help the
world, you'll find a way. If you want to make a bunch of money and fuck the
world, you'll find a way to do that too. The problem is cultural and resides
at the individual level.

------
refrigerator
Might be of interest:
[http://www.givedirectly.org](http://www.givedirectly.org)

~~~
stites
Especially check out some of the research they have done which addresses some
of the questions in this thread: [https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-
give-directly](https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly)

direct link to paper:
[https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapi...](https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapiro_UCT_2013.pdf)

------
mattkrisiloff
Small update: if you're interested in applying for the research position,
please submit by end of day, February 15th.

------
phkahler
I have a more fundamental question that I intend to work on at some time down
the road, and it is this:

How does the money flow, and at what point does it brake down?

You see, if we give every person basic income of $BASIC, that money must come
from taxes (else we just have runaway inflation). So ultimately every dollar
spent needs to be collected in taxes. That's not to say it gets taken away by
the government at the first transaction. The velocity of money will play a
large part in determining the tax rate required to collect all the money back
to the government. But that velocity will be low if a large number of people
choose to not work. It also depends on propensity to save and some other
factors. I'd like to see even the most simple analysis of this to get a feel
for the math and what some obvious constraints it places on the system.

Has anyone done this and published a blog?

------
cryoshon
I am thrilled to see that there is some private interest in exploring the
possibility of BI/UBI experimentally within the conditions of the USA. A
properly executed study of this type could be definitive in the shaping of our
society.

I expect that some form of radical redistribution of resources is going to be
the next modality of human civilization, and getting started on the colossally
difficult questions (how to ease existential angst of purposelessness and how
to kill the work ethic) is just as important as the very-difficult particulars
of implementation (how the heck do we find what the right amount of money is,
and how do we pay for it) and measurements of efficacy.

I'm extremely interested in the opportunity to lead or be a part of this
research group, and will be applying in the coming days.

------
stanfordkid
I am all for research into basic income -- and in fact a big believer. However
I take a HUGE issue with reading too much into the viability of the system
based upon research done on small sample sizes: "Our idea is to give a basic
income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period"

There is emergent behavior that arises in the economy as _a function_ of the
number of people given a stipend or living wage. For profit colleges are the
perfect example. If grants are given to a small set of people the scale of
demand necessary for such businesses to _exist_ is insufficient. Crank up the
number of people and a new market is created that allows for the existence of
predatory "for profit" college businesses that take advantage of funds that
would have otherwise been allocated properly.

~~~
johndevor
How can it be possible to run an experiment on basic income when participants
know it will end in five years? The knowledge of it ending will change their
behavior and encourage them to remain working.

~~~
stanfordkid
This is another great point!

------
nostromo
I would love to see a GiveDirectly
([https://www.givedirectly.org/](https://www.givedirectly.org/)) trial in
first-world countries.

Take a few people that would qualify for various public assistance programs
(reduced housing costs, food stamps, disability, welfare) and instead just
give them that money in one big annual lump sum.

My hunch is that this would be more cost effective, particularly given the
much lower cost of administrating cash payouts vs restricted use programs. But
it's also possible all of the money would just go to drugs and alcohol. It'd
be a fascinating study.

(I realize this isn't basic income, as basic income is not means-tested -- but
it'd be a great first step in that direction.)

------
jngreenlee
Teaching people to control their costs, ala "mr money mustache" makes sense.

I personally believe that you can control your costs and raise a family on
$30k/yr if you are educated on the bad choices not to make...several cars on
loans, larger houses than needed, etc...

~~~
jgord
I genuinely don't know how a couple could raise one child on $30k/yr - is rent
cheap where you live ?

If you had have asked me what a couple needs to raise a kid in the US, I would
have guessed 80k.. maybe 60k if they are very careful with money management,
as you suggest.

I'm actually being sincere.. but where I live rent is very high, so perhaps
that explains the vast difference ?

~~~
redthrow
How 'Mr. Money Moustache' Retired at Age 30

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvJ4bwnAHnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvJ4bwnAHnE)

------
bischofs
I think this is one of those dreams that will always be pushed into the
future. People will always want to own new things that come out even if we see
them as useless. The cost of living always rises and people will want to work
to afford it - and other people will want to work to create it. Automation
will get rid of a lot of jobs but as a person writing code to automate
engineering work currently this is not as inevitable and straight-forward as
people think it is. These automated jobs will be replaced quickly with new
jobs that can not be automated - just look at the current US economy as proof-
you would think we would have automated a lot of jobs by now but we are at
full employment.

------
stevesearer
Opinions on Basic Income aside, if this were ever to become a reality in the
US I'd like to see it be added to the US Constitution as an amendment because
it seems like such a fundamental change to the structure and thinking of how
government works.

------
blackkettle
This was rejected by the parliament last year:

[http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/10/swiss-parliament-
opp...](http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/10/swiss-parliament-opposes-
popular-initiative/)

but is currently slated for a public referendum here in Switzerland in 2016:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016)

I think it is one of really only four possible futures for human society
[mincome, totalitarian, oblivion, expansion into the solar system and beyond
(which will me effective status quo)].

------
tshannon
This will probably never be seen, but one of the best things I think we can do
to lower the cost of living as well as help get people into paying jobs is
localize the economy more.

Make it more efficient to buy food from the local farmer / farmers market than
having it shipped around the world to the nearest walmart.

Make it easier to do local and smaller scale manufacturing (think 3d
printing).

When your economy is local, it's efficient, green (remove the high cost of
transportation out of the equation) and it feeds on itself with jobs and
money.

I'm building something right now that I hope will be a step towards reaching
some of those goals.

------
jl6
The 5 year period of this study will be a significant limitation. An important
part of a guaranteed basic income is the _guarantee_. If I was in a programme
that I knew would end after 5 years, I would be very concerned with things
like maintaining my employability when the 5 years are up. In other words,
while I would love to dedicate 5 years to non-commercial art and science, my
option to do this is severely curtailed if I'm expected to re-enter the same
old job market with 5 years less experience than my peers.

But overall I am thoroughly supportive of doing the experiment anyway, as we
do desperately need more data on this important concept.

------
padobson
* Solve problems in hiring by hiring all applicants on a first-come, first-serve basis and then evaluating them for X days before recommending the best applicants to a client company. Scale this up by partnering with the government to eliminate traditional unemployment insurance.

* Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no cost by using advertisers to subsidize it. Could this be done with food or housing? Would a farm running on self-driving tractors and drones be able to feed people w/ ad-subsidized food for free?

* Lots of food gets thrown away because it's cheaper to ship it to the dump than to ship it safely to starving people. A startup could develop automation and logistics to make the costs competitive.

* Divorce rates would seem to indicate that the traditional family is not the most economically or emotionally optimum method of living/raising children. This may simply be a side-effect of increasing lifespans (i.e. 100 years ago, the average marriage lasted 15 years before a spouse died). A legal startup that offers tools for building new types of non-conventional families to optimize things like economic standing, academic performance of children, or changing employment environments.

* Micro-businesses in a box. Many businesses couple some talent or skill (e.g. software engineering, music, plumbing, creative writing) with administration (i.e. legal, marketing, accounting, invoicing, etc). Lots of startups offer to automate portions of administration, but a truly turn-key solution would allow a customer to simply input their skill, and the administration would happen automatically.

* Crowd-funding life.

\----An apartment building with 20 units costs $1mm to build. An affluent
person goes to the bank and puts $300k down to build it, and leverages the
other $800k. Why can't 20 families each invest $15k and pay a group mortgage
instead of rent?

\----A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10. Why can't a
thousand families buy all their bananas for the year through an intermediary
handling the cash flow? Could they buy all their food this way and drive
prices down?

~~~
bkmartin
Farming is quite a bit more expensive that what you realize. Besides, this
model doesn't even make logical sense. Follow with me... 1) Advertising is
only worth it if the people who see your ads can and will buy your goods at a
large enough rate to give you the needed ROI on those ads. 2) If people are so
poor that they need free food then they won't have the means to make point #1
viable.

Your second point on food. Yes, lots of it gets wasted. There are quite a few
areas where we can talk about waste and food cost. The best way to cut
transportation costs is to just improve farming in places where food is
scarce. This is not an easy task, but a much better long term solution in
every way measurable. Ethiopia is the shining example of progress in this
area. One of the largest wastes of food in the United States is what slides
off of our dinner plates and into the trash. This increases demand, which
increases prices, transportation cost of both supply and disposal, increased
cost in cooking and prep, etc. We could save billions a year as a society if
we cut our waste.

Divorce rates are the fault of the people that are married. Marriage, if the
vows are followed, is amazing. Married people live longer and have children
with lower crime rates. The answer is for people to actually stick to their
covenant and make a marriage work. People need to learn to forgive, extend
grace, and act selflessly toward their partners. Marriage is no place for
rugged individualism, it is truly a team sport. A family where children grow
up with both of their loving parents is the ideal situation. Situations are
not always ideal, but at least we have something to strive for.

Under the crowd-funding life section... aren't both of these sections
essentially just co-ops? Not that they aren't good ideas but I think they do
exist already and without the buzzwords.

------
arikrak
Everyone pretty much has basic income by the standards of a poorer place or
time. The issue is people adjust their expectations based on what other people
have. So things like air conditioning would have once been considered a luxury
are now considered a necessity by many. People will likely feel poor if the
average income is much higher than what they have. To get rid of the feeling
of poverty one would need to make income more equal, but we know that's not so
great: [http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html](http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html)

------
gavingmiller
This has actually already been studied/tried in the 70's in Dauphin, Manitoba
[1][2]. The experiment saw a decrease in accidents, injuries, and mental
health issues.

[1] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-
povert...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-poverty-
experiment-called-a-success-1.868562)

[2] [http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-
experi...](http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-
experiment.html)

------
fooad
@sama

I strongly believe that money is not the variable that has to change in the
equation. I'd change the minimum amount of hours required to qualify for a
full-time job (e.g. 40h / week).

Most of us aren't %100 productive from 8am to 5pm. Meaning, employers wouldn't
really see much difference. If you reduce a 40hour week to a 20hour week,
maintaining the same salary for each employee, people would have more free
time. More time to do something awesome, etc. While maintaining the same level
of income. That's what we should be aiming for and it wouldn't require a
dramatic change in our society.

My 2 cents.

------
shriphani
Basic income sounds like a very good idea.

As a teenager, I saw this news blurb from the George Bush presidential
campaign. A woman (single mother) was working three jobs to make ends meet and
the audience engaged in a massive circlejerk. Couldn't help think about the
incredible waste of a life - soul-sucking jobs that ensure this person doesn't
move up economic classes, has no time to focus on self-improvement and gets to
provide no attention to family. And then the next generation continues this
cycle.

In the 21st century - we must change our approach to governance - dignity for
everyone.

------
avip
Maybe increasing prosperity for everyone in a finite (and diminishing)
resources world, occupied by ever growing number of humans, is not feasible.

I'm also not sure how we'll go about defining a measurable prosperity?

~~~
alexmat
You're observation is rational, but hard to connect with emotionally. Which is
why these self defeating feel good efforts will persist.

------
erik998
The best studies and books I have seen on Basic Income come from Guy Standing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_%28economist%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_%28economist%29)

"The Precariat" has some great ideas on how the relationship between the state
and individual are changing. He also covers the current dynamics in welfare
assistance for citizens of a state and demonstrates how basic income would be
easier to administer and lessen the burden if proof needed to gain assistance.
I also like how he examine s the current status of citizen vs non citizen and
proposes the notion of a "denizen."

If you are an a contract programmer I recommend reading "The Precariat." All
the extra work you do for work should count for something but it is sometimes
not given any recognition.

Watch the youtube video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OraivQ45ME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OraivQ45ME)

Standing, Guy; Jhabvala, Renana; Unni, Jeemol; Rani, Uma (2010). Social income
and insecurity: a study in Gujarat. London New York: Routledge. ISBN
9780415585743. Standing, Guy (2011). The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury
Academic. ISBN 9781849664554. Standing, Guy (2014). A Precariat Charter: from
denizens to citizens. London New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN
9781472510396.

------
shykes
If I weren't busy doing Docker, I would be doing this. In fact given enough
time and resources, I'm confident I will eventually find a way to leverage
Docker to advance the goal of universal income somehow :)

Figuring out basic income is perhaps the most important thing we could do as a
society, because it will unlock the energy and creativity we're lacking to
solve every other important problem.

Trying to solve global warming, energy, crime or government without basic
income is like running a marathon on one leg.

------
RankingMember
I'm curious to see how Finland's basic income system turns out. I think doing
so would drop the omnipresent fear of being destitute and homeless, which
would do a lot to improve mental health.

~~~
fsloth
Finland already has a quite thorough social welfare system - no-one is
homeless unless they have a bag of other problems than a lack of income.

Mental health - not so good.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate)

You will notice Finland has way more suicides than US.

~~~
flubert
Rates of homelessness:

US: 633782 / 314000000 => 202 homeless per 100,000

Finland: 7877 / 5363000 => 147 homeless per 100,000

Based off of numbers from (YMMV):

[http://www.housingfirst.fi/en/housing_first/homelessness_in_...](http://www.housingfirst.fi/en/housing_first/homelessness_in_finland)

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

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+usa+in+20...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+usa+in+2012)

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+finland+i...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+finland+in+2010)

~~~
david927
I don't about those numbers. My only guess is that Finland's is vastly over-
stated and America's vastly understated. The wealthiest countries of Europe,
which includes Finland, really don't have any homeless to speak of. Whereas in
America, it's a huge epidemic, including even small towns.

------
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.

------
eanzenberg
One of the biggest fallacies of the BI movement is they suggest that when AI
automates many menial jobs it will lead to mass unemployment. This assumes
that the average person is incapable of more skilled labor, when history has
shown time and again that people adapt to the changing workforce. Yes there
can be lag but it's not insurmountable.

Another problem I have with BI is it equally distributes assistance with no
prejudice to those more needy, i.e. the elderly, the disabled, the mentally
ill, etc. So you take many funds away from people such as 70+ year olds who
are on medication, SS, assisted living (which cost >> BI provides) and
distribute available funds to able-bodied people who are "discovering
themselves".

Further, having considerable able-bodied people leave the workforce by choice
delays global human progress and achievement.

Instead, I am for additional public-sector money being spent on country- and
global-level goals which the private sector cannot achieve nor make
profitable. These include environmental, energy, medical, transportation, and
infrastructure research. By putting public money into these research fields
(which is hard/impossible to make profitable) you incentivize progress in
areas which further human progress that cannot be met through private means.
If you instead incentivize able-bodies to not work, not only do you take money
away from needy (not much savings in admin costs) but you delay human
progress.

~~~
ufo
My worry about automation is less about people being left without jobs and
more about that production ends up concentrated behind those with the capital
to purchase automation tools.

~~~
eanzenberg
Which if you read my last point, would increase taxes on those where capital
is concentrated to be spent on research I listed.

------
ohitsdom
Where is the application to be a part of the experiment group? I'd prefer that
over the control group...

~~~
mattkrisiloff
It's too early to say -- we're obviously not experts ourselves on this kind of
research, so we're going to look to the researcher who joins us to first
design the study.

------
vbean781
Someone pointed me to a good book on this topic called "Scarcity" written
jointly by an economist and a psychologist. It looks at what happens to our
minds when we're in a "scarcity mindset" \-- basically, we have tunnel vision,
lose attention span, self-control, and the ability to plan long-term. Your
mind is compromised, and that's a cause of perpetual poverty (i.e., if any of
us suddenly became poor, we'd start behaving predictably like those who are
low income do).

Along those lines, they suggest a few types of things startups (or anyone)
could do to reduce mental stress for people. For example, adult continuing
education classes where it's ok to slip up or learn on your own schedule
(thanks to technology). Or savings products for young people that start before
they are desperate and living in a world of scarcity (and prevent them from
going to a payday lender one day). Or a service that gets patients to take
their meds without having to think (I think at least one startup is already
attacking this).

For things that require behavioral change (like making on-time mortgage
payments, or saving money), maybe social pressure can be used in productive
ways....like it is in microfinance groups in the developing world (small
groups borrow collectively and group members encourage one another to repay).
Anyway, just a few ideas...this is a great topic.

------
dbpokorny
I was under the impression that the problem was a corrupt and impenetrable
legal system built to erect barriers to entry and protect insiders, the virtue
in whose hearts is boiled away in the fires of greed and lust for power.

This is a sort of French Revolution type system: the elites can keep shitting
and pissing until suddenly a conspiracy forms and KABOOM a whole bunch of dead
rich people in the street and NOBODY CARES because they're perverted scum ! !
!

B R I N G

B A C K

T H E

G U I L L O T I N E

------
jsherwani
TL;DR: It's less about "apps" and more about people supported by technology.
But I do believe startups can increase prosperity as long as growth (without
profits) is the goal.

From someone that spent 5+ years at the intersection of technology-based
international development, there's a lot to learn about what works and what
doesn't. Kentaro Toyama headed up Microsoft Research India's "Technology for
Emerging Markets" research team and oversaw 50+ research projects spanning
health, education, governance, and more. He then spent 5 years at UC Berkeley
writing a book about what he learnt ("Geek Heresy",
[http://geekheresy.org](http://geekheresy.org)).

I did a PhD in this general area (voice interfaces for non-literate users),
and Kentaro's main thesis (technology only amplifies human capacity and
intent) resonates deeply with my experience. It's all about the people, and
technology is mainly an amplifier / supporter of human institutions. An "app
for K-12 education" doesn't work in the traditional sense, but an app that
connects awesome teachers with students, with an ecosystem that takes care of
management, training, incentives, and encourages true mentorship, has a much
higher chance of success.

------
ph0rque
_Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?_

I've actually been thinking about that for quite some time now. Here's what I
think will help increase prosperity:

* Inexpensive housing: something like the Tiny House movement, but more mainstream and less expensive.

* Automated food production, such as my side project, AutoMicroFarm.

* Inexpensive electric transportation.

* Universal health insurance.

The above four items would enable anyone to have the vast majority of their
needs met. I plan to expand on the above in a blog post.

------
BjoernKW
Just a quick note on sama's question on reducing the cost of living. One
aspect that comes to mind and I think that this is key in significantly
reducing the cost of living for urban populations:

Reducing or at best completely doing away with the necessity for people to
travel to a place of work (both commuting and one-off business trips), i.e.
solving the problem of cultural aversion to remote work that still is
prevalent in most work environments, particularly - of all things - in Silicon
Valley startups. Why is it that the world's brightest minds apparently still
haven't solved the problem of physical location? Why do I have to be in a
tremendously expensive location like San Francisco if I want to start a
Silicon Valley kind of startup?

Solving the problem of commuting / requirement of being at a physical location
at a particular time potentially could free up so many resources for both
people and companies (which wouldn't have to pay office rent in an expensive
area of town anymore) that funding a basic income would be cinch.

------
jhallenworld
Start a micro-investment company that allows people to invest in others to
live and better themselves for some kind of cut of their future income. Do
this at a huge scale.

The problem with basic income is where does the money come from? It's either
loaned, taxed or invested. Loans are bad because you are enslaving the
borrower. Taxes are bad because you are stealing work/labor from the taxed.
Investments are best: you probably won't make your money back, but the
possibility could provide incentive to give.

On the recipients side: perhaps there is value for them to promote themselves
(in a Kickstarter kind of way) for more investments. Just the exercise might
give them ideas of how to increase their own value.

Have the fed become the basic investor. This means inflating the money supply,
but somewhat curtailed because successful investments have some payback. This
is perhaps the fairest tax-like money source- it really hurts those with large
amount of parked cash the most, which may not be such a bad thing. It
encourages them to do something better with their money.

------
davemel37
Probably the best way to decrease the cost of living is to balance information
asymmetry so that buyers know everything that sellers know when transacting.
Price comparison and fighting predatory businesses is a start, but too much
commerce revolves are arbitrage and exploiting the vulnerability of being
uninformed.

Balance out the knowledge gap and consumers will be able to transact directly
with producers, bringing down costs across the board.

------
deadowl
Thoughts:

* Standards of living are variable, and especially so between different social classes.

* Debt requires someone to earn more money than they would otherwise need to in order to meet the same standard of living as someone without debt.

* The variety of higher margin products and lower margin counterparts create inefficiency in making consistent spending choices, particularly when it comes to visibility (e.g. marketing).

* Healthcare costs can be extremely variable from person to person.

* A big question is what it takes for a person to feel contentment. E.g. I have multiple family members living hundreds to thousands of miles away from me, from each other even, that I never get to see, and I would be a much happier person today if I was able to spend more time with them. Other factors can include obtaining a sense of achievement in what you do with your time, or a sense of approval from your peers.

* People have a much smaller pool of peers to identify with if they don't go to a regular workplace or gathering of some kind.

* There are regional differences in supply and demand, especially for property, housing, water, and egress. I'd include food, too, if I didn't think you were targeting the US.

I can probably come up with more, but I'll just leave it at that for now.

------
ggerritsen
Great initiative! I'm really interested in how this would turn out in the US.
In Norway, it's been somewhat of a success, hopefully in the US as well!

------
bsbechtel
I think a related question to ask is "What will people do with themselves when
technology has displaced a large majority of jobs, and how will that be
financed?" When technology has displaced all the jobs, the only thing that
will be left will be research and the Arts. It seems both of those have an
infinite amount of work to still be achieved, and technology will never be
able to automate away those fields completely.

------
cloudwizard
Start with reducing the costs of basic needs. Shelter - micro apts, container
based Lots of regulations make this problematic in short term.

Food - Basic nutritious food should be cheaper. Currently, cheap food is not
nutritious or that cheap. Even Soylent costs $2.83 and many do not consider
that food. A meal should cost less than $1. \- 2 ways that I have been mulling
* Automation for on demand food * Mass production of simple meals.

------
mikerichards
_giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached_

There's always strings attached, either directly or indirectly.

 _50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not
being able to eat as a way to motivate people._

Considering current political trends, I find it significantly likely that in
50 years government would use fear of many different things as a tactic to
"motivate" people (food among them).

------
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.

~~~
DrScump
<This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit
vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes>

I don't know of a case in the USA where a public transit agency has done this
without making transit _worse_.

For example, this was tried years ago in Santa Clara County. Called "Dial-a-
Ride", the implementation was that an individual could call for a bus to pick
him/her up and take to a given destination. The theory was that an assortment
of people would all have origins and destinations along a common route, so
you'd have a de facto ad hoc "bus route" for that collection of journeys.

But when you crunch the numbers even this ideal scenario, the time lag in
chasing down and picking up the subsequent riders makes the trip time and
length for the original rider uselessly long.

Nevertheless, this went on for years, with the result being that a handful of
individuals got chauffered around at extremely high costs. It was computed
that it would be _much_ cheaper to have taxpayers pay for individual cab rides
for everybody. Eventually, it was dropped, but it continued in south county
for additional years.

And to this day, VTA is the financially worst-performing major transit system
in the nation (as measured by percentage of farebox return on variable costs
-- don't even _ask_ about how much worse it is when fixed costs are added).

------
oneJob
Compare the U.S. Constitution (7,200 words) to the E.U. Constitution (76,000
words). Many comments are focusing on the mechanics and details. That approach
leads down the road to 76,000 words. The goal is a macro issue, not a micro
issue. Committing to a basic income is something that should be done for the
same reasons we go to war or go to the moon. Not because it is easy or
profitable but because it is what we want to do and believe we have a moral
imperative to do. A basic income does not require that everyone become
industrious. Nor does it guarantee national economic superiority. It is
simply, and profoundly, a commitment to ensuring that every individual shares
in the economic wealth generated by our society.

[http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/comparing-us-
eu-...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/comparing-us-eu-
constitutions)

------
AlexWest
Thank you for doing this. This is truly the kind of thing the tech industry
needs to be doing in order to make a net positive impact on society and
promote a more agile, results-based social super-structure.

EDIT: So many of the comments here are obviously ideology driven. I am
ideologically in favor of full automation and UBI but doing this kind of
research will help us move forward in an informed and scientific way.

------
kriro
Some thoughts that are not related to the topic of research but rather the
program:

\- I love the idea of YC sponsoring research.

\- Some more information about the program itself would be helpful. 5 years is
long for a research program. What does this cover? Income for the researcher,
other costs, are they required to live in SV or maybe somewhere else?

\- Where are the sponsored basic income people supposed to live/how will they
be selected? Any plans for this already?

\- (!) Important: Please make it a requirement for the research to be as open
as possible. Require datasets to be made available and all publications to be
made available online (if journals/conferences make sure they have Open
Access). Also make the research process as open as possible.

\- Consider making the application process as open as possible, too. Publish
the materials/proposal that was submitted by the "winner". Possibly publish
unsuccessful applications with some comments as well. I know that this isn't
going to be a high priority but there's a distinct lack of feedback for
unsuccessful grant proposals in science.

------
deepGem
One area that can be improved by startups without the need for enormous
entitlement spending is food. I don't mean the radical notion of liquid food
or pill popping (though that day might arrive sooner than later) or even
manufactured food. I'm talking about employing simple robotics to reduce the
cost of farm labor. Tasks such as cutting the paddy crop. All these years,
plants have been engineered to suit the machines and that has reduced farming
costs. However, these machines are expensive and work only on very large
farms. If we engineer machines to suit the plants growth, we can achieve a
dramatic cut in costs as these machines or robots won't need scale. By scale,
I mean you won't need a 100 acre farm to use one. Even a small farmer can rent
a robot to maintain his 2 acre farm and produce food at a very low cost.
Couple this with the dramatic reduction in transport which will be brought
about by electric and self driving trucks - we are looking at food that will
cost next to nothing in the next 20-30 years.

------
dmichulke
There will be a big questions to answer:

Will the basic income be paid in addition to standard gov't subsidies?

If yes, how do you make up for the shortfall of money? "Taxing the rich" is
nice in theory but IMHO it doesn't work right now, what are you going to do to
change that?

If no, it might be worth it, if you also fire the bureaucrats currently
working on gov't subsidies (freeing up the money thereby) But I don't see how
your study will account for this, nor do I think this is feasible because
gov't tends to increase in size and has no incentive to decrease. Other
beneificial aspects would be decreasing the size of the code of law and
forcing "social security lawyers" to specialize in something else, reducing
costs of all other lawyers. Again, it will be hard to put it in practice and
difficult to account for in your study.

I suppose you also have already read some literature on the topic. From my
personal viewpoint I'd recommend "Economics in one Lesson" by Hazlitt [0],
it's decidedly non-mainstream and I wonder if it's taught at all in
universities today but the only economic theory based on game theory (although
not explicitly) and fully consistent IMHO.

I also believe that funding a multi-agent simulation is probably cheaper for a
few economic models (I'd volunteer here)

Finally, I see some business value here, namely studying whether it would make
sense to fund persons instead of start-ups, as e.g. Entrepreneur First does
[1] (I have no affiliation)

[0]
[http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf](http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf)
[1] [http://www.joinef.com/](http://www.joinef.com/)

------
djoshea
Definitely think it would be interesting to see YC Research's take on
economics research, but I'm left wondering, why would someone want to take
this position? As opposed to, say, entering an economics PhD program and
studying the problem there. To be clear, I don't mean to spark an academia-vs-
industry (or whatever YC research would be categorized as) battle. I don't
know the field of econ research well and my prior would be that more
perspectives and approaches to the issue would be helpful in studying the
problem. What I'm interested in what would someone personally want out of
doing this research but without the support of collaborators in a more
formally collegial academic setting or the reputation and pull of an
established think tank.

To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that taking this position is a bad idea,
I'm just trying to better understand the opportunity and why YC research might
be a better decision than a more run-of-the-mill PhD. I'm ever so slightly
skeptical, but mostly just curious.

------
pinn14
Throwaway for this--I'll get back to lurking (I'm not sure what password I
used). I read it. I agree. The way there will be difficult. I've been on
unemployment and noticed how pointless the weekly reports were. This will get
rid of a lot of systems that need to be removed. I make good money and stand
to inherit great money, but I do hope for all sentient life on Earth.

------
lagudragu
Let's play the devil's advocate here; the problem isn't that the current
system needs to be replaced, the problem is that the current system has become
overcomplicated and open to a lot of abuse. Basic income will not be the
solution on this system, it will just replace it with a "clean slate" dragging
a lot of questions. How will the Basic income be regulated? If Basic Income
will be implemented, how will the current market evolve around it? Will the
amount of Basic Income be the same over all participating members (countries,
states, ...)? How will Basic Income react to strong market fluctuations? Etc.

A lot of jobs will be lost in the future due to technological advances (as new
jobs will be created as well) and Basic Income is a noble approach to replace
an imperfect system and prepare the population for these changes. But for the
far future I'm not convinced it won't be prone for the same difficulties and
(corrupt) influences the current system has endured.

------
bcheung
As technology improves it is going to raise the talent bar required to be
employable. Eventually it won't make sense to hire 50% of the population. A
solution will be needed.

If housing, education, food, and energy were made super cheap through
technology we could provide those services instead of a basic income.

Given plentiful resources what stops us from multiplying until we consume all
available resources. Perhaps, if we had basic income it should only be
provided once people turn 18. That way parents wouldn't keep having kids in
order to get more money.

Housing: Looking to Buckminster Fuller. He wanted to have houses assembled
from modular components that could be shipped. Standardization of parts would
make things cheap.

Food: Robotics and biotechnology can increase yields and bring down costs.
Also, aquaponics is an extremely productive system. It uses 5% of the way that
traditional agriculture uses and fish consume only 1/10th the feed that cattle
do. Also, duckweed (it grows like a weed) is easy to grow and feed the fish.

Education: Stop with the college model already. Technology is the answer. Look
at Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, etc. For education that needs more hands
on training bring back the apprenticeship model. Let them get their education
/ training for free in exchange for working for free in the field for a
limited time.

Infrastructure: Public transportation needs to be a priority. Cars sit idle
95% of the time. Once we have self-driving cars they should be pooled. Just
schedule a time to be picked up.

For basic income, we might want to only provide it for people age 18+.
Otherwise parents will just have tons of kids in order to collect checks. That
will lead to overpopulation and eventually consuming all available resources.

------
xixi77
A couple things I am curious about:

\- Basic income is usually proposed as a replacement to some or all services
and income support people currently receive. I wonder if it is feasible to
simulate that -- e.g. adjust it downwards for people receiving more public
assistance (other than things like medicaid of course), or paying lower taxes,
etc. -- this of course would depend on the funding model(s) to which results
need to be applicable. Otherwise, following the study, people will surely say
that what was tested is very different from what was proposed.

\- Systemic effects would be relatively hard to evaluate with such a study, an
example would be the change in both absolute and relative prices: e.g. I would
expect that after a wide adoption, housing prices in cheap and mid-level areas
might rise more than in currently expensive areas, because the added income
would change the purchasing power of lower-income households by a much larger
percentage -- or perhaps not. I guess it might be possible to try to account
for things like this at the data analysis stage.

------
pdonis
_> I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living
is a critical component as well._

I think startups should focus on the second, not the first. The reason is that
the second is a technical problem, or rather a lot of different technical
problems, all of which are exactly the sorts of things that startups can
tackle and succeed in solving.

The first problem, however, is a political problem. Startups are not the right
tool to use to address political problems. That's not to say that startups
can't play a role: they certainly can. But the role they play is to solve the
second problem, and thereby make the first problem a non-problem. If all of
the necessities of life were essentially free, because they were no longer
scarce (for example, if food were as easy to obtain as air), then there would
be no need for basic income because there would be no need for income. So
startups can't solve the political problem in the usual sense; but they can
"solve" it by making it no longer exist.

------
greendestiny
An element of the future economy that I don't see addressed in this comment
thread is the ability of technology to improve our ability to DIY. While AI
may replace the need to hire labour, sufficiently shareable DIY technology may
replace some of the need for people to consume the resources of others.

Granted advanced manufacturing is likely to stay in specialised facilities,
but with open source and self replicating tools we may be able to put power
back in the hands of the masses.

An obvious step along this path is 3D printing, but I'd argue that wikihow and
other sites are greatly increasing the ability of people to meet their own
needs. My own interest is in 3D imaging so that computers can reason about the
world more readily, and not just replace jobs but replace skilled labour by
augmenting our abilities.

Personally I'm more interested in a future where we use our own machines to
live how we choose, rather than be given a stipend to buy the labour of
machines controlled by increasingly narrow monopolies.

------
nl
There are many good suggestions around how to increase prosperity so far.

Could I make point related to the proposal?

In order for it to be accepted, I think it would be very useful if people
could understand the modelling. Obviously this is difficult because economic
modelling is pretty hard.

However, a good first step would be to make the model open - and preferably
hosted on some kind of notebook-style platform so anyone can change the
assumptions are try it.

I'd note that the Fed Reserve's economic models are open[1][2] and frequently
updated, so there is some precedent for this.

[1] [http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/frbus/us-models-
pa...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/frbus/us-models-package.htm)

[2]
[http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2005/835/revision/if...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2005/835/revision/ifdp835r.htm)

------
johngalt
In the same way that PG described wealth inequality at the top, there are also
a number of reasons people aren't prosperous. Certainly poverty can be a
roadblock to someone who would otherwise be prosperous, but we are fooling
ourselves if we believe that is the case for all. There are starving artists,
but there are also people who will just do the minimum required at any point.
In my opinion there are two problems here.

1\. How to maximize the number of prosperous people.

2\. Ensure that those who will never be prosperous still aren't going to
starve.

Incentives clearly matter in human behavior. Which is why I believe a negative
income tax would be a better system than BI. Choose a livable stipend with
free time or the alternative is digging ditches for very little difference in
pay? I know what my choice would be. Conversely taking a low paying or part
time job to supplement a negative income tax could eventually turn into a few
years of experience on a resume to take the next step up.

------
miguelrochefort
There is no such thing as Basic Income. There is no universal set of basic
human needs. People will never be satisfied, no matter what you give them. We
can't even agree on the purpose of Basic Income:

\- Is it an investment/bet that's expected to result in increased
productivity?

\- Is it a way to preserve humanity?

\- Is a way to entertain the elite?

\- Is it just "the right thing to do"?

To me, all of this feels like a primitive defense mechanism. People anticipate
that they will become obsolete, rightfully so, and they come up with crazy
strategies to preserve their relevance. Some even go as far as believing they
can avoid this fate through fantasies such as "friendly AI". By letting their
animal instinct take over, they miss the big picture.

Rather than slowing down progress, we should all aim to make the universe more
efficient. Namely, we should aim to preserve consciousness, with as little
resources as possible. Think "The Matrix". The physical world is just too
rigid for the mind.

~~~
omegaworks
>There is no universal set of basic human needs.

Actually, a lot of people have thought about this.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

------
JabavuAdams
Question: Why is work a good thing? Much of the work that gets done is all
heat and no light.

It's really interesting to read this discussion and get a sense of how deeply
the work-ethic is ingrained. Many commenters can't seem to imagine that people
would do anything productive if they're not paid to do it. Is this really what
you believe?

------
sbardle
I would investigate implementing a basic income through the creation of an
alternative currency system. That is, everyone who subscribes to the system,
gets a certain number of free credits equivalent to 10k a year, in exchange
for certain responsibilities. I don't see how it can be done using the
existing fiat currencies at the moment due to lack of political support, but
if you could pilot and trial it on say Bitcoin, then you might be able to
scale it at a later date when the political climate has changed and everyone
understands that software is eating (or has already eaten) the world.

------
tanker
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

Make starting a business as easy as possible: 1) Have all the legal stuff
taken care of through a web form that fills out all the paperwork in a
standard way. When a business becomes sophisticated enough, they get a lawyer
to customize their solution if necessary.

2) Provide simple business banking at the same time.

------
jp_rider
I don't know whether basic income will be effective, but I hypothesize that
its changes in incentives will reduce productivity and happiness for the
majority of people.

Personally, I’m more interested in a system where costs of living are
drastically lowered. Subsidies could work, but I think technology could play a
large role. Imagine a clothing factory where everything is automated. Raw
fabric comes in and finished clothing comes out. With minimal human
interaction, variable costs should be much lower. Customers might even be able
to design custom clothes with software.

Nonprofit organizations could be established to maintain the factories and
equipment. Their primary goals would be to minimize cost, ensure quality, and
maximize customer satisfaction.

Obviously, such a system would require a lot of capital and technological
advances, but I believe it is feasible. This idea could also be applied to
other areas like farming, electricity, ISPs, etc.

------
rdl
It seems a lot more efficient to do a tabletop or synthetic study, rather than
outright paying people BI as a sample.

Probably what I'd do is look at people receiving benefits equivalent to basic
income. Disability is a good proxy for some -- you would need to correct for
the disability itself. 20 year military pensions are another.

------
orky56
With regards to college tuition, the relatively easy access to capital via
student loans has increased the cost of tuition over time. The demand for
post-secondary is relatively inelastic since it is a strong factor in higher
incomes down the road. If we apply this same logic to basic income, how can we
ensure that basic income won't just further drive the increase in cost for all
basic necessities that a basic income would contribute to (e.g. housing, food,
utilities)?

For better or worse, the only way to "control" the costs would be if each of
these basic necessities were led by government institutions or regulations as
well as healthy competition for the production. That is a large step
politically and socially but may be inevitable if we want to see a basic
income succeed.

If anyone has any research or studies on related phenomena I would be very
interested.

------
pasbesoin
Here is a basic sub-piece, that I think is a cornerstone:

"Basic" (i.e. guaranteed, for non-esoteric treatments) health care.

My personal experience has profoundly introduced me to the principle that the
rest of my well-being and performance is founded upon my health.

If basic income is too difficult or determined to be counter-productive, what
about this?

------
ThomPete
The first thing to realize when it comes to Basic Income is that it's purpose
is not to optimize how the workforce will work out, but to deal with the fact
that there will be no workforce in the future.

In other words. If you expect ex. income taxation to be part of the way to
deal with Basic Income it's doomed to fail.

------
clavalle
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

One thing I've been kicking around, though I am not sure yet how it would
work, is measuring potential demand for a traditional good or service -- a
type of sentiment analysis to find gaps in the market.

When I'm thinking about this problem I tend to imagine market gaps in physical
space -- where could people use a sandwich shop or game cafe or a heavy
equipment rental, for example.

The traditional route, which seems needlessly wasteful in a world driven by
data, is for someone who happens to have capital to come along and start a
business either because they /feel/ there is a need, or because a similar
business has been started in similar situations, or a similar business is
raking in profits -- basically they guess (educated or not) at demand and
spend a lot of time and money vetting that guess. Or, even more error prone,
because they have a passion and decide to roll the dice. Then it either
succeeds or fails to make a profit for a variety of reasons and their test is
validated or not.

With kickstarter proving demand for potential goods that can be ordered and
delivered, there should be a way to measure spacial demand for a good or
service and move the capital required to willing and able people in that area
to get it started. Perhaps even collecting information on what particular
business practices might have a high likelihood of working...distributed and
generalized franchising based on latent demand.

The idea seems particularly relevant in a discussion of basic income. If
someone hates their job and are working only to stave off homelessness and
starvation or to maintain some basic level of comfort and they are given the
means to not worry about that anymore -- well, then they will likely try to
figure out how best to improve their situation. What better way than starting
a business with a high likelyhood of creating value for your neighbors? It
answers the question: what can I do to to have the most impact in my
community?

------
mrtron
It isn't clear what we should optimize on.

    
    
        Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?
    

The "idleness" seen in playing video games seems very close to most jobs. Many
factory jobs have more mental idleness and less fulfillment than a video game.

~~~
Natsu
Yes, working at a factory production line is utterly mind-numbing (I speak
from experience) even if one is bored enough to use the spare brainpower to
perform all sorts of microoptimizations, but at the end of the day, one
provides people with goods and the other uses up electricity to provide
entertainment, so the value to everyone else isn't the same.

And we do need to provide each other with value, or there won't be enough
things to buy no matter how many dollars we have.

------
andy_ppp
I'd like to see this sort of research too...

I'd also like to see things like the tax system be used to make changes to
income inequality - both in terms of like for like pay as well as to some
extent evening up the pay professions each sex choose to go into. i.e. if you
are a woman you get tax off up to a certain amount because society screws over
your pay for getting pregnant.

I'd also love to see meat taxed on a trading system where by everyone would
get a meat quota that was quite small - if you want to eat shitloads of meat
great - go for it - but you have to pay someone else for their meat points.

You could set the level of everyone's meat tokens for the year at a level to
raise people out of poverty/or alternatively just to reflect the costs to the
environment.

I'll releasing more totally unworkable economic policies soon... :-)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Your "meat points" idea is horrible, because it destroys market knowledge.

That is: In a free market, there are two things, supply and demand, and they
communicate via price. In your idea, you fix the amount of supply, for
absolutely no reason. All that's left is for the price to move the demand to
where it meets (no pun intended) the supply. But you're throwing away half of
the ability of the market to respond - the supply side, and you're doing it
_for absolutely no reason_.

Um, unless you're doing it as research. That... might be interesting research,
but I suspect that it will show that "supply and demand" makes a more
efficient market than "demand alone".

~~~
andy_ppp
"for absolutely no reason"

I thought manufacturing meat was destroying the planet?

The whole point of the idea is to stop the supply side isn't it and the price
of meat remains at whatever level the market thinks - the meat tokens are
traded separately. It's simply that there would be a centrally planned amount
of meat produced and it would go to those willing to pay the most for it. The
tokens that everyone gets are designed to sweeten the deal for those who
decide not to eat meat.

Sure you can eat meat, but your quota is worth £4000 per year to someone.

I'm not saying cap and trade has worked well for fossil fuels, but this is
effectively carbon offsetting done in a better way.

Unfortunately I'm not certain that capitalism has solved the problems we are
going to face over the next century if we want to survive. If we leave things
to the market completely all this cheap oil will ruin the environment. Needs
to be taxed.

------
jeffdavis
This is a challenging research problem -- perhaps harder than nutrition and
diet research to answer anything definitively.

In the present, everything is connected. Giving someone basic income may mean
that they demand higher wages for, say, working as a waiter in a restaurant.
But if you only give basic income to some people, then those people still
benefit from low-paid waiters (which wouldn't happen if it were on a national
scale).

On top of that, it's a dynamic system. Traits like work ethic are partly
cultural or passed down in families. Maybe the first generation of BI benefits
more from work ethic, but it may decline in a few generations, perhaps
undermining BI. That may not be apparent in a small study even of taken over a
long time, because the participants will not be isolated from the surrounding
culture.

------
eaandkw
From an economic point of view. How would you provide Basic income for
everyone while at the same time eliminating the "wage price spiral" effect of
normal goods such as milk and bread. I am not an economist but I would be
curious.

Another point would be who gets to decide what a basic income is. Why stop at
basic income. One thing that always troubles me able minimal wage discussions
is why start minimum wage as say $15 dollars an hour. Why not $100. I actually
believe that if we eliminated the minimum wage altogether the wages for
various jobs would be able to find a better equilibrium then setting a
artificial minimum. The argument the employers would reduce wages to $0.50 and
the like would not happen because everyone would quit.

------
p4bl0
For those of you who can understand French, be sure to check out Bernard
Friot's work on that subject.

------
ams6110
_50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not
being able to eat as a way to motivate people._

Could not disagree more. This has been the ultimate motivator for all human
accomplishment, as well as the evolutionary enhancement of all living things
on the planet.

~~~
fsloth
Uh, are you sure? No one will starve to death in Sweden and thei businesses
are internationally quite competetive.

I would claim Maslows hierarchy is a pretty good model of human motivation -
people strive for great things just to be admired and for the love of the art.
Not everyone - but those that wont will not turn into Leonardo da Vincis
through starvation.

------
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.

------
magicmu
I think disrupting the core components of our society that decrease and
inhibit growth of wealth for specific groups of people would be the most
effective way to increase prosperity for everyone. These components include,
but are definitely not limited to:

\- credit (specifically housing and pay-day loans) \- the necessity (real or
imagined) of a college degree \- quality and subject matter of pre-university
education \- utilities (specifically electricity and internet) \- housing and
rent

To be clear, I'm not advocating the direct removal or destructuring of any of
these things. I do, however, see these as disruptable (but largely ignored)
aspects of our society and economic system that have direct, adverse effects
on many groups of people.

------
mej10
I am working on cognitive behavioral therapy-based software that aims to fix
unhelpful thinking and behavior. It is like Joyable, but for more general
thought patterns.

I believe this can at least help people with their inner lives -- which can
translate into benefits throughout.

------
intrasight
>50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not
being able to eat as a way to motivate people.

Don't know where you live, but here in Pittsburgh anyway the soup kitchens
won't turn you away just because you participate in a tech incubator.

------
Uhhrrr
I'm really interested in what happens if the basic income _isn 't_ used wisely
and doesn't change outcomes. What do you do when half the population is
obsoleted by technology in that case? PR campaigns and cash rewards for
getting a vasectomy?

------
dsugarman
I think about this a lot. I think privatization of wealth reallocation could
be the best model. If you could directly inject capital into underprivileged
communities to do social projects, you could have twice the benefit to these
communities. I imagine a platform where you could see social project proposals
or propose your own and have people apply to run them. You can pair them with
experts, give them the funding and let them hire peers to help accomplish the
goals. You then have given them a livable income as well as improved their
community.

I don't think it is as pure as a basic income, but rather than just
redistributing wealth, it also creates wealth specifically for underprivileged
communities.

------
studentrob
> Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are
> people happy and fulfilled?

The answer to this question is influenced by so many environmental factors
that it would be difficult to do one study and arrive at a repeatable answer.
Communities, countries, cultures, weather, and so many other things are at
play.

We already know that education and training produce self sufficient people. If
startups want to to give back, they should start with something they know and
incorporate more training programs into the workplace. Develop growth cycles,
from beginner to professional, and build a culture of renewal and community
that makes people want to stick around.

------
pcmaffey
Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

We need a better system for measuring and distributing the value of our work.
We lose so much collective value because of the system of inefficiencies built
up around how we quantify that value. When 70% of working Americans don't give
a shit about their job, we're talking about trillions of dollars worth of
"productivity" wasted...

Prosperity comes from people doing meaningful work and exchanging that for an
abundant lifestyle. I love the idea of basic income, and am 100% in support,
but it is only a tool that will (hopefully) enable people to find their
meaningful role in society by alleviating the struggles of poverty
consciousness.

~~~
RangerScience
1) [http://www.amazon.com/DAEMON-Daniel-
Suarez/dp/0451228731](http://www.amazon.com/DAEMON-Daniel-
Suarez/dp/0451228731) 2) Industrial augmented reality is a real thing that is
really happening 3) Data-driven economics

It's my dream that some day we can know enough about how energy and goods move
throughout society that everybody is more-or-less able to do what they want
with their lives, and we use information technology to simply arrange them in
groups such that civilization results.

------
RivieraKid
It's important to realize what exactly basic income is, because it's a
somewhat vague concept. People typically mix two different concepts, the
amount of income redistribution (how much money goes to welfare) and the
structure of it (who's eligable, etc.).

What people usually call basic income is different from current systems in
these points:

\- It's automatic, no paperwork or going to authorities.

\- It's simple, everyone gets the same amount - disabled people, people with
children, etc.

\- The income jump from unemployment to employment is higher.

But I don't think the difference is that big. Just modify a few parameters of
the current system, perhaps change the level of income redistriubution to your
liking and you have basic income.

------
analog31
It occurs to me that we could also turn the question around: What could
increased prosperity for everyone do for startups? Some thoughts:

1\. Financial risk is an element of prosperity. Lowering risk by improving
public services and the safety net embolden more people to pursue a startup. I
would spend more money if I didn't have to hoard every penny against the risk
of a health crisis or period of unemployment.

2\. Prosperity is the source of demand for products and services.

3\. Broad based consumer demand can support infrastructure which, in turn,
supports startups. An example that I can think of is the cell phone system,
which really took off when "everybody" could afford a cell phone.

------
joeclark77
My first thought about this is that, if I had a guaranteed "floor", I wouldn't
have to live in a big city but could move my family to a cabin in the woods.
Perhaps what YC should experiment with is something like a new Homestead Act:
you'll get an economic foundation to stand on, but only if you're willing to
work the land, so to speak: you have to _do_ something with it, whether that
be starting a company, writing, farming, or something else creative.

I 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?

------
silverlake
Robert Gordon, Econ at Northwestern, has a book out saying national
productivity and growth rates will be very low for the foreseeable future. If
you believe that, then you can only increase prosperity by redistributing
current wealth.

------
TulliusCicero
> I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is
> a critical component as well. I'd be very interested to hear thoughts from
> the HN community about what we could be doing here.

Increasing rents in particular metros (the ones where the good jobs are at) is
the most obvious and solvable cost of living problem we have right now. Pretty
much all we need is to just permit more housing to be built, in the form of
radically loosening zoning regulations that block dense housing. There, done.

Housing in the bay area would still be somewhat expensive with more liberal
guidelines on housing, but nowhere close to where it is right now.

------
petra
@sama: i think you've chosen the wrong format to do this. To lower cost of
living, i.e. transform the economy is a huge task , that would require much
more research effort than a thread.

On the other hand , you've got access to an extremely talented and large group
of people, and if you steered them towards a group of sub communities all
highly focused on working together to find solutions to each of the individual
sub problems - than i'm sure we'll see lots of great ideas and insights.

That's all assuming it's possible to build such collaboration. But the goal is
so appealing to many , so i think it's possible.

------
nvision
Fascinating topic. I can see why it is popular.

1\. basic income implies that there is a fixed minimum cost for comfortable
survival. Does it require organic food? Does it require clean air? Does it
require etiquette training? Does it adjust for localized prices? Does it
include a vehicle, video games, and gadgets?

2\. a simple analogy to zoo kept animals comes to mind. The more detached from
the holistic view of nature and the cosmos humans get, the worse off we
become. Why? because everything IS connected.

3\. Money is a flawed system because you are equating material goods to non-
material concepts. It will never balance out. Not even with gold.

------
bufordtwain
* Provide help/advice for people making big financial decisions. For example, help them when buying/renting a house, buying a car or dealing with an expensive repair. Help students with career counseling and college decisions with an eye towards their future finances. Point out less expensive options and hacks (e.g. community college for 2 years, then transfer...consider not going to college until they are more certain what they want to do...). The startup could charge a fixed fee for advice (or maybe have a subscription model for advice at any time, a bit like Angie's list).

------
xiaosun
How about instead of using a "basic income" to enable people to pay for living
expenses (food, housing), how about cut out the middleman and just pay for
food & housing? This could be a system of college dormitories that people can
live in free of rent, and includes cafeterias that serve meals free of cost.

Anyone can live there, with some sort of local government oversight. You want
to live somewhere nicer? Make money and pay more. You fall on hard times or
want to cut costs while working on the next big idea? You don't have to worry
about not having food on the table or roof over your head.

~~~
109876
I think you just described homeless shelters.

~~~
xiaosun
Except with better branding to address social acceptability.

------
maxharris
Are you prepared for your researcher(s) to conclude that a "basic income" is a
bad idea? Or is this idea part of your ideology, and no amount of looking at
the world will convince you otherwise?

------
LargeWu
Stop thinking of startups as "startups" and instead as businesses. The whole
startup mentality of prizing growth and valuation, at least from the outside,
seems greedy, rapacious and unsustainable.

------
dschiptsov
There is nothing much to research, because the concept contradicts to the most
basic principles of ecology, economics and sociology.

The first principle is that a population always outgrows its resources. As
long as one create conditions to sustain a life it will start to reproduce
exponentially. Rabits in Australia is a classic example.

The second principle is the scarcity principle of economics. Everything which
is easily available loses its value by definition. Any amount of free money
would be factored out by increasing of the prices, as if you move the zero on
a scale.

The third principle is of social hierarchy. Each society forms a hierarchy to
be sustainable. It is so fundamental, that we never think of it, but there is
no flat societies even in animal kingdom.

Again, basic income is just moving a zero on a scale. Prostitutes will not
switch to living on that income, they will merely rise the prices, because
prostitution is social phenomena much more than economical. The food market
will adapt accordingly, so the only food one would be able to buy will be a
synthetic crap made out of cheapest substitutes - this is how markets work.
Same would happen with housing. Land is a scarse asset _and_ the most ancient
status item _and_ a source of income. Free money will change nothing there.

And, of course, there were lots of experiments since the beginning of time -
all these socialist or communist utopias which failed the reality checks -
they crashed and sunk down after a collision with economical and social laws,
which are as unalterable as the laws of physics.

Simple models doesn't work. There is no other way of sustainable ecosystem
exept self-regulation due to competition over scarcity of resources. It is
very naive and dangerous assumption that human intelligence could beat laws of
the Universe or evolutionary forces. The mess we are in is the best evidence.

~~~
thomasfromcdnjs
This shouldn't be down-voted, quite reasonable and makes sense. Mostly, moving
a zero on a scale.

~~~
ketzu
The parent comment claims simple modles wont work based on simple models.

The "moving 0 on a scale" argument is brought into play with minimum wage (for
example 2:[1]) but it most likely wont happen.

There are other points completely ignored by the parent post like welfare
already in place (shouldnt this cause the same effect?), dimishing effects,
etc etc.

The parent comment cites nothing and mixes basic income with "thats basically
communism and communism has obviously failed".

I think there are reasons to downvote the parent comment, even though my
comment does not provide much better quality.

[1]
[http://www.salon.com/2015/08/04/the_7_most_dangerous_myths_a...](http://www.salon.com/2015/08/04/the_7_most_dangerous_myths_about_the_fight_for_a_15_minimum_wage_partner/)

------
Kinnard
I don't think we can have the conversation about basic income without having
the conversation about currency.

Right now the government has basic(or really much more than basic) income . .
. it can create the money it needs to do what it wants. And this trickles down
from the President and the Speaker of the House to the foot soldier and the
mailman.

This is a feature of the monetary system and it is only challenged in rare,
extreme, or politically charged cases.

Perhaps we should think about innovating the currency to provide basic income
to citizens rather than to the state.

------
RA_Fisher
History repeats iteld, so it might be good to start by hiring a historian. The
claims of impending mass unemployment that serve as the premise for Basic
Income were common during the Industrial Revolution. For example, see the
"Luddites"
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)
Ultimately what happened then is that greater efficiencies actually increased
the demand for labor. Supply begets demand.

------
AlexWest
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.

------
dools
You guys should get in touch with Randall Wray from the Levy Institute

------
forrestthewoods
Bernie Sanders at the recent town hall meeting asked for someone to tell a
story of their struggles. A woman in tears told of how hard it was to get by
on $10k to $12k a year.

It makes me wonder. How happy will people who only get basic income be? How
easy or difficult will it be for them to get simple work for a little extra
income?

Now there is a big difference in getting $10k for free vs scraping it together
from 4 different crappy jobs. But still I wonder. I came away from that story
less confident in basic income that I previously was.

~~~
glibgil
Why shouldn't basic income be $36,000?

~~~
forrestthewoods
Why shouldn't basic income be $100,000?

Most napkin math proposal for basic income are between $10,000 and $15,000.
That's quite hard to make work but it's maaaayyybbeee posssibly achievable.
It's at the outer limit of doable but meaningful.

In the US 36k per person would account for 66% of GDP. It'd be 85% of GDP in
France. These are not viable figures.

~~~
arebop
It shouldn't be $100k because that exceeds mean income, and we don't have
strong evidence about how much BI improves productivity.

I think the reason most proposals are well below the mean is that we prefer a
modest effective intervention, and the desired effect is to remove the
hardship of poverty, not to achieve perfect income equality.

------
alcima
Beyond just the amount, I hope your project delves into the issue of effective
administration and levels of personal choice. For the first you can look at
the recent bio identity cards and direct receipt of a basic income in rice in
India. Radical decrease in societal cost and increase in personal benefit. For
the second it is a question of where do I receive a basic income for - eg
Tiburon or Temecula - and how is this decided and administered. For this
consider the troubled hukou system in China.

------
jakeogh
What a cop-out calling it "basic income". As if it's somehow "free money".
Really it's just a further institutionalization of theft, of course making
people more dependent on mother government. Imagine the debate, should we
raise basic income by x or 2x?

The solution is not more laws, it's less. For example ending the war on drugs
would have a immediate effect on the lower income brackets. If I didnt pay
>1/3 of my income to support our $T war complex I could hire more people.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Nice job defining all taxation as theft without actually stating it.

I can kind of see a basis for that - people with guns enforce that you pay
your taxes. On the other hand, in the US, Congress decides on the budget, and
we vote for those folks. And we don't seem to care enough about government
spending to vote out the ones that spend a lot.

And, if taxation is theft, what is your alternative? Government supported by
charity? Government supported by printing money? No government? What?

~~~
jakeogh
Individual income and property tax specifically. There are other ways gov can
raise money. Gov has the printing press (although I want to let people decide
what money is and what to trade in). Gov supported by charity is usually
presented as an absurdity, like nobody would earmark donations for the DOD, I
don't think that's the case.

Agreed that people just dont care enough, I think a part of that is the
constantly re-enforced state of fear which promotes the protection racket.

------
fnordfnordfnord
Here are 7 pages which you may have already read, but may even still wish to
read again while considering ideas such as UBI; especially if you are a critic
of such things.

By Keynes' estimation, those who are discussing such things right now are
right on schedule.

 _John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)_
[http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf](http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)

------
scottmp10
"We’re looking for one researcher who wants to work full-time... who are
driven and talented but come from poor backgrounds." (please read the entire
paragraph to understand the context of this)

The combination of hiring researchers that come from poor background with the
author's stated belief that a basic income would likely be a good thing makes
the entire set up seem very biased.

I like the idea of promoting research into the subject but I don't think this
is the right way to do economic research.

~~~
namenotrequired
So hiring someone from the same rich or middle-class background as every other
researcher will somehow mean they're less biased?

You won't find people without bias, but you can restrict your own selection
bias in finding them.

------
hackercomplex
>Do people, without the fear of not being able to eat, accomplish far more and
benefit society far more?

Why not basic commodities ? I mean distributing significant quantities of
corn, corn-meal, flour, rice, a wide variety of beans, dried fruit, beets,
onion, millet, granulated garlic, etc. The stuff that you can make a vast
array of healthy foods out of.

This eliminates much of the possability of waste in the system, and at the
same time it doesn't expose the individual to legal and privacy complications
that come with 'income'. It translates into money in people's pockets
indirectly because now their family's food budget is dramatically reduced.

I think this is a more elegant solution but the reason why it's difficult
politically is because it incentivizes individuals and families to put more
time and planning into home food preparation. There are billion dollar
advertising campaigns aimed at conditioning the exact opposite behavior which
is one reason why it's probably politically untenable at this time.

Also I'd like to raise another point which is that I find it somewhat
disturbing that a major startup community leadership organization is so
interested in possibly attempting to influence the national policy around
financial issues in a way that is so far removed from the technology domain.

Are you guys a startup incubator or a think tank ? In other words are you busy
conducting research to churn out position papers designed to influence the
national debate on non-tech issues ? If so then how transparent do you plan on
being with founders, past, present, and future about this entire process as it
evolves going forward ?

The reason why I believe it's a bit of a stretch to consider this a tech issue
is because in my view the idea that "technology is eliminating jobs" seems to
be a false premise statistically speaking. To me it's a debate centered around
how "free trade policy" is influencing the global job market and how that has
impacted the United States economy. I believe that in the US at least the tech
ecosystem has created more jobs, a whole new economy in fact which didn't
exist before. It's the non-tech jobs that are gone, but they weren't
eliminated by technological innovation as much as they were dispursed globally
in the wake of certain regulations.

------
brightball
Would that work? Part of a basic income is the knowledge that it's guaranteed
to be there. I'm not entirely certain that you can do a short term test for
it.

------
skilesare
I've proposed a number of things at
[http://catallax.info](http://catallax.info). It boils down to changing
incentives. We are currently incentivised to get the most for our dollars in
the present. When you change the incentive to allow for more reward in the
future if you spend your today dollars 'better' you can make sentences like
'decreasing the cost of living' much less relevant to the conversation.

------
ctdonath
_What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?_

Do what startups do: create new opportunities, for both workers and customers,
at competitive prices. It's what startups do.

------
hyperpallium
Ennui, once the province of past aristocracy and present trust-fund babies,
will be accessible to all! Survival is the natural meaning-giver.

You need bread AND circuses.

TV, movies, reddit and video games are the modern circuses, but we need to
make MEANING accessible.

Startups, with lowering barriers, are part answer. But not winner-take-all
unicorns; more like long-tail lifestyle businesses. So that everyone can be
uniquely useful, regardless of direction or ability (Ricardo's comparative
advantage).

------
ccvannorman
Speaking from personal experience, not having to work 9-5 at a dead end job
has astronomically increased my personal well being, productivity, and
contribution to society (ed-tech startup). If I had been born in the lower
class and never had any capital/runway, I would never have been able to do my
startup -- or at least not yet, and not with this much impact.

9-5 service jobs so that people can pay rent needs to become a thing of the
past, so many lives and talent gone to waste.

------
jliptzin
Online voting needs to happen first before we have a chance of implementing a
basic income in the US. The right wing just does not believe in science or the
results of research that doesn't fit their worldview, so anything that comes
of this will be moot, until they lose enough power through dying off, or
through much higher participation rates among younger voters (online voting).

------
jl6
Additionally, I wonder if basic income can be effective while there are still
shitty jobs. Right now, _somebody_ has to clean the toilets, because there
aren't yet robots that can do it cheaply enough.

If you introduce basic income so that nobody _has_ to do the shitty job,
nobody _will_ do it.

But one day there _will_ be robots that can clean the toilets, and then there
will be no shitty jobs left to do - and perhaps only then can basic income
take hold.

~~~
vkou
Which, according to the basic principle of economics, will cause pay for the
shitty, but necessary jobs to rise.

------
nathan_f77
Damn, there goes another one of my "what I'm going to do after I make a lot
money" ideas. I really wanted to run a study like this, especially after
hearing about GiveDirectly and seeing their research. In fact, that's what
GiveDirectly is already doing, at least in Kenya and Uganda. But yeah, it
would be really interesting to see what would happen in the US, or another
developed country.

------
narrator
Just a brainstorm, not even sure if this is a great idea:

Perhaps a good thing to do with a universal basic income is tell people they
can collect it from anywhere. This is what people do with social security and
such. They go live in cheap countries where they can get dental and medical
work done for 1/10th the price. Cheap food, cheap rent, etc. The lowered
demand for these things in the US would lower prices here. Everybody wins!

~~~
namenotrequired
Except the people in the cheap countries who see their prizes rise because of
the influx of relatively richer people.

------
MaricopaArizona
(Cross-posted from a similar thread)

Has anybody studied the outcomes on American Indian reservations from having
basic income guaranteed for generations? I'm not an expert or well-read in
this field, but I think anybody advocating basic income would be interested to
visit a reservation and observe the lifestyles, dreams, goals, and successes
found there.

------
SkyMarshal
_> Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?_

A general theme here is to identify every element of our current economy and
society that we use debt to access, and find ways of disrupting that, of
providing same or equivalent access without debt. Shelter, transportation,
health, and education are all ripe for that kind of disruption.

------
tchock23
Great concept! Regardless of who you select to conduct the study, I'd like to
volunteer the use of my software (FocusGroupIt - focusgroupit.com) as a way to
capture qualitative feedback from study participants on an ongoing basis.

That kind of ongoing feedback would be invaluable to capture the day-to-day
experiences of study participants, and I'd be happy to volunteer my time to
support the study...

------
matchagaucho
Abraham Maslow addressed the psychology of basic needs in the 1940's.

[http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html](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.

~~~
eevilspock
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.

~~~
matchagaucho
Family wealth is typically lost within 3 generations.

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”.

------
danieltillett
What we need is to study is what changes we need to make to the education
system to support societal structures post-employment. Mass unemployment is
coming yet we are doing nothing to prepare the population.

We need new "career paths" where people are prepared for a life without work
so that things do not devolve into what we have seen in remote communities
here in Australia.

------
zmanian
There are lots of interesting questions in an effective basic income system.

Sybil and fraud resistance come to mind immediately.

If I were in the top 0.01% of wealth, I'd really like to see research into
basic income. It would help with deflationary spirals, social order in an
automated future and increase the supply of good ideas because it would free
more people to explore high risk areas.

------
Dwolb
My non-profit's focus is on early childhood education in developing countries.

It's sort of a long time to see a payoff but economically-speaking these are
some of the most efficient education dollars people can spend (it's a time in
the child's life that has high leverage).

You can read more about how we're trying to increase affordability here:
www.sharedforkids.com

------
marcusgarvey
What can startups do to help increase prosperity for everyone? Help get money
out of politics. This is fundamental. In the current state, all policies are
tilted towards the most prosperous among us. We all know this. We need our
public servants to be incentivized to work towards the public good. This is
the foundation without which all else is futile.

------
brador
As a company founded on disruption and (mostly) willing phd dropouts i'm
surprised you've set this at 5 years.

Ask yourself, is the additional research in extra years worth it over what can
be accomplished in x years? (1-2 years in this case).

I say do what you've always done: fund disruptive ideas. In this case,
research proposals with short timescales and big impact.

------
vesinisa
The Finnish social security agency (Kela) is currently implementing a study on
basic income. You can read about their experiment here:
[http://www.kela.fi/web/en/experimental-study-on-a-
universal-...](http://www.kela.fi/web/en/experimental-study-on-a-universal-
basic-income)

------
shams93
Ultimately the fact we neex to talk about this issue is a sign of just how
much progress we've made. We're on the cusp either of ww3 and or technofacism
or a new age where most people spend their time in the arts or pure sciences
all those "dont quit your day job" dreams have a chance oglf coming true.

------
csense
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

Increase the range of opportunities that are within an ordinary person's
budget. Nowadays it's fairly simple for the average Joe to buy or sell things
online, create a blog, or rent small amounts of server time.

Give people something they can do, and a way they can get paid for it.

------
jmarbach
The Thiel Fellowship is a data point of basic income for 18 - 22 year olds, in
lieu of continuing education in college.

~~~
benmathes
With some pretty strong selection bias which will likely make generalizations
difficult.

------
arasmussen
I just published a Medium post about this exact subject: Tech Innovation &
Economic Inequality. [https://medium.com/@a13n/tech-innovation-economic-
inequality...](https://medium.com/@a13n/tech-innovation-economic-
inequality-501b1c2b7fa8)

------
equalarrow
Is YC the precursor to The Federation? :)

------
cookiecaper
The most important thing that can be done for long-term prosperity is to
eliminate almost all forms of debt. Debt ends up making everything cost (at
least) 2x as much and is the reason why everyone feels the requirement to be
perpetually employed. In the US, we've built an entire lifestyle on debt.

I'm not talking about consumer debt here (though that's a problem too), I'm
talking about the debts that are intrinsic to the system used to obtain a high
standard of living in the US. Those debts are what keep most people shackled
down.

If you want to take a sabbatical because of a series of hard knocks in a short
timespan, you can't, because if you stop working, you'll lose everything you
own. If someone can take everything from you when you stop giving them money,
you don't own it. That's the core problem, the core reason employment is so
stressful and the core reason that losing a job is a major life negative.

Want somewhere to live? You gotta pay that house payment and/or rent. Very few
"home owners" in the U.S. are actually home owners, they're effectively just
renting the house from the bank. Even 30 years after getting their first
mortgage, most are not home owners because they've sold and rebought their
homes several times over the years.

Want (need) to drive to get somewhere? For a decent car, it'll be $300/mo for
6 years (+ insurance). You might be able to go a few years without a payment,
but by year 10, most cars are going to be worn down to the point where they
have to be replaced, and you'll have to start making payments on a fresh one.

Want a decent job? OK, we're down with that, as long as you pay your non-
dischargeable entrance fee of $50k+ student debt for the privilege. Actual
skillset or competence is of little relevance for most professions.

Make all of these things so cheap that they don't require debt, _or_ make
these things available in some attainable way that doesn't require debt and
allows people to _actually own_ something, and we'll have a huge portion of
the problem solved.

Of course, the powers that be really hate it when someone isn't in debt,
because debt is literally free money; usury is the most effortless way to earn
money in existence. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money by
keeping the citizen dependent on them for big, necessary purchases.

Perhaps the government could offer 0% financing on all of these items --
homes, cars, and education. That might be a start to breaking the debt cycle.
Another thing that would help is moving back to multi-generational housing and
maintaining a strong culture of inheritance.

------
newjersey
I think that there ought to be a maximum wage that is linked to the minimum
wage (we can switch over the baseline to the basic income if we ever get basic
income implemented).

The idea is anyone earning over the maximum income[calculation] will pay
almost all of the amount over the maximum wage as income tax.

Calculation: I propose that the maximum income be a hundred times the current
federal minimum wage times two thousand. The assumption is that a full-time
employee works two thousand hours a year. Under my proposal, we will raise the
federal minimum wage to $15 per hour which will set the so-called maximum
income at $3M a year.

Of course, we do not want to penalize people from making more money. Nobody
shall go to prison for making more money. I just think that any income over
the maximum income should be taxed at a higher rate which I propose should be
90% of the income over maximum income.

If/when we get a basic income system working, we can switch the so-called
maximum income to a hundred times the basic income. I hope the mega rich will
support this plan as unlike the estate tax, this is not a tax aimed at the
eroding their assets. As long as they do not take distributions from their
corporations/ trust funds/ "charitable" funds, their assets should remain
safe.

I know the federalists will turn in their graves as I say this but we cannot
afford to have state and local governments do as they wish. When Texas steals
business from California or Kansas steals business from Missouri, the
consequences are just the same as when China steals business from the US. We
need to federally enforce standards that prevent some states and communities
from being "business friendly" at the expense of the people.

Edit: will the downvoter please care to say a few words?

~~~
notahacker
(not the downvoter FWIW) I think you lost most people when you suggested the
status quo "mega rich" should get to keep all their assets whilst the tax
system is redesigned to stop anyone catching up with them through
entrepreneurial zeal and hard work...

~~~
newjersey
We already have an estate tax that maxes out at 40%. As long as we don't allow
any more exemptions or windows, it shouldn't be a problem. We may quarrel over
whether or not free lunch at work qualifies as income (I'd say it is not worth
it to make a fuss) but use of corporate funds for personal expenses would
count as income for the person if we are worried about these things. As long
as the mega rich do not receive and spend over (for example) three million
dollars a year per person, why should we worry about them? If they take over
three million dollars and pay 90% off the top, they are more than welcome to
do so in my eyes. The main thing is that there should be no exemptions for any
reason. Exemptions, exclusions, deductions, tax discounts, and such are
inherently examples of central planning. I can't believe that we would allow
such communist ideas in our country.

My goal is not to facilitate people to become ultra rich through
"entrepreneurial zeal and hard work". It is just the same ignorance as shown
by pg in his recent essay where he says that a startup entrepreneur who
becomes a billionaire is somehow better or more desirable than a billionaire
who inherited his money. What I want is to get a solid foundation so people
are not worried about their next meal or a clean dry place to spend the night.

If someone creates a new business process or a new gizmo that does the work
that formerly took one thousand workers, well I am thankful to the person.
However, we will still cap his payday at a hundred times the minimum living
wage. I think it is a fair deal. People who do things should do things because
they want to do things not because they want a big payday and become "mega
rich".

Edit: There was an article that I read the other day that said something along
the lines of forget the mega rich the upper middle class is the cause of the
decline of America.

~~~
notahacker
So the only tax break you're permitting is for inheritance?

One doesn't need to believe that a startup entrepreneur who becomes a
billionaire is somehow better than a billionaire who inherited his money to
find line of argument that implies the only exemption in the tax system should
be for inherited fortunes unfathomable.

~~~
newjersey
I think paying in taxes almost half of the inheritance is good enough. We just
need to ensure there are no exemptions or loopholes.

------
dbroockman
What's funny is the best study would involve picking some people at random and
giving them a basic income -- something YC could easily do. Theory can only
get you so far on this one (although would be necessary to interpret the
results of an empirical study).

------
laotzu
Basic income is an idea which has been made practical due to electric
automation.

Why is it then that everyone assumes the surplus created by electric
automation should be distributed using such a primitive legacy paper based
information system as the dollar? That's 19th century thinking

------
shurcooL
All I can add to the discussion is that I'm excited to see this, I take this
as a sign of progress and us moving closer to a better future, rather than
continuing on as things are (which isn't bad, but can be better). I hope it
goes as well as I think it will.

------
kolbe
Are you looking to study this topic from a macroeconomic, sociological or
psychological point of view?

------
rajacombinator
Startups already increase global prosperity enormously by targeting massive
markets with scalable solutions. Ultimately, the way you make money as a
startup is by offering value to your customers, i.e. increasing their wealth.

Some examples of this include: Uber/Lyft, decreasing transportation costs and
improving quality for millions, while creating tens of thousands of jobs;
Airbnb, same thing for hotels; social apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc,
increasing entertainment/information flow to users, creating new media
careers; etc. So startups don't need to operate any differently than they do
now ... Think big and make big moniez!

One thing that definitely does not work are "social enterprise" startups.
Distraction from the brutal realities of market forces ultimately leads these
to fail while patting themselves on the back for doing "good."

In the spirit of the question though I'll list a few areas I think have
enormous potential.

Money services and lending - very difficult to innovate here due to the iron
fist of Uncle Sam and banking cartels. I think what's needed is either, 1) US-
caliber teams operating outside the US or 2) products that skirt the law a la
Uber/Airbnb but like those products are so positive with users that going
against them becomes a risk for politicians.

Health - outsourcing/telepresence, reducing the cost of basic testing. Again
may need to operate outside the US.

Legal - enormous value to be unlocked by standardizing and automating this
field a la Clerky but better. Difficult to get lawyers on board, they are very
good at extracting rents.

Real estate - breaking regulatory capture of Realtors.

End of life services - we're all in this market. It's not sexy so not much
innovation.

Education - it's so backwards that you can innovate in any dimension.

Investment - despite nominal progress on things like crowdfunding, there
really hasn't been a big impact yet by startups in increasing access to
capital / opportunities to invest. It's still far too difficult to raise money
for new businesses. Again, may have to operate outside of the US for this and
consider innovative legal structures.

Science - breaking the University stranglehold on credible scientific research
through crowdsourced/funded efforts. Enormous potential to cheaply fund
studies especially those that go against orthodoxy or corporate interests.
Again may need to be outside US.

~~~
swampthing
Founder of Clerky here - trust me, we're working on it ;)

------
logn
Increase prosperity by creating a K-12, open source homeschooling curriculum
and application.

------
rokhayakebe
Help me find an abandoned city and rebuild it.

Work with the government to get us experimental-close-to-full authority on our
laws so that we may rewrite and change them dynamically.

We pull Social Contract.

We share everything. Money is only used to transact with others outside our
city limits.

Software.

------
melbourne_mat
+1000 for Sam Altman

I always thought rich guys - particularly American ones - are just a bunch of
selfish assholes.

I'm heartened to see that there is at least one - Sam Altman - who thinks
about those outside his social circle.

------
honksillet
I would focus on oligopolies that have formed or are forming... cable TV,
internet access, banking, Credit Cards, etc. There need to be nimble
competitors in these industries that eat away at the bottom lines of these
industries.

------
ljw1001
Not sure any startup can fix the fundamental problem that technology moves too
fast for evolution. Came from a long line of big, strong, not-too-bright
people? You're kind of screwed. Not much call for that anymore.

------
jonbarcus
Super awesome research project.

Definitely something we should look in to for the sake of humanity.

------
randyrand
I would love basic income.

I could just stay and play computer games all day =) Relax and go out!

------
djschnei
I think a negative income tax is the only sane way to approach this.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM)

------
ebbv
This is really awesome and I am so glad you guys are doing this. Bravo.

------
prirun
Instead of giving everyone free money, we should work on stopping currency
devaluation. It's a bigger problem that affects us all, but the poor much more
than the rich.

------
chubot
My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some
opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income.

That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free
(this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or
an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that.

In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to
PAY for this, if we're not even willing to pay for the necessities of life?

People still die from untreated diseases, and I believe there is significant
research to show that poor health CAUSES poverty (rather than poverty causing
poor health). If people are healthy they will likely be more productive
members of society.

~~~
mosquito242
My assumption about basic income was always that at it's core, it provides the
money for food and shelter. This reduces bureaucratic overhead in terms of
trying to provide people those goods, and gives them the freedom to make their
own choices and not have to work to survive, and the government is no longer
forced to create the infrastructure to try to find ways to provide food and
shelter. This may, however, require work in terms of providing affordable
housing options to everyone, but I don't think you have to solve one problem
first to solve the other.

Health Care and Education are a separate (but still related and important) set
of problems. Both of those require greater infrastructure on the part of the
government to provide effective solutions, so again this is a problem that
also requires a lot of thought and effort, but providing basic income doesn't
seem like it would preclude health care/education reform. Nor does it seem
like solving health care and education reform would change the structure or
overall effects of a basic income program; they're simply additional solutions
that would certainly improve our quality of life and possibly the efficacy of
the program.

~~~
chubot
OK, well this is a good thing for YC to fund an experiment to test.

If given basic income, do people spend money on food and shelter, and plan out
a good life, or do they live day-to-day and remain a burden on society?

This is why I think education, for example, comes before basic income. Without
education, you can easily imagine people remaining homeless despite the
income.

Of course some people will succeed and some won't -- the question is the
ratio.

Some rich people are scrupulous; some rich people waste their money. I don't
see any reason to believe that poor people are any different. I think we can
still help those people with education, etc. without wasting taxpayer dollars.
But how much would be "wasted" is of course an open question.

------
twoquestions
One thing that I haven't seen considered is the cost and complexity savings of
a Basic Income safety net over our current patchwork safety net, in addition
to being more effective.

------
reledi
What's in it for YC?

~~~
sama
YCR is a non-profit; we just think this is important and interesting. Though
if it does turn out, years down the road, that basic income happens, I suspect
we'd get more people starting companies and that would obviously be good for
YC.

~~~
mikeg8
> we just think this is important and interesting.

Not trying to kiss ass here but it's this type of thinking that sets YC well
above the rest, IMO.

~~~
wesleyfsmith
I had the exact same thought.

------
nfc
I object to the notion of unconditional basic income. I think the possibility
of large portions of the population underachieving in their return to society
while we are still not rich enough as society to afford it is very real. I'd
propose a twist to this unconditionality. I'd much rather see a different
brand of basic income in return for work that everyone can do in a relatively
small number of hours per month (20h?-40h?).

In order to implement such a system we need a reliable way for society to
judge the voluntary work of its members that would justify the basic income.
And a set of works with social value offered to those whose chosen work is not
deemed worthy of basic income.

I'll just try to make this more clear with a possible implementation of such a
system.

You are allowed to receive your basic income and do whatever you want as long
as a number of randomly selected people consider your work worthy of basic
income.

A way to organise this would be to present what you have done in some kind of
predefined format at the end of each year. These people decide if what you
have done is worthy of you getting your basic income another year. Otherwise
the next year you have to work in one of the state accepted ways to get your
basic income (by teaching, playing with kids, cleaning the roads or whatever
thing we as a society agree it's always worthy). To maximise the
accountability I'd choose these random group of people in the community of the
person who receives the basic income. They will have better ways to know
wether what is presented is actually being done and worthy. These 'judges'
would need to be anonymous to minimise the potential for social engineering to
game the system.

This is just an example, I think we can devise different versions of the
control structures following the same spirit for works that do not adjust well
to this kind of evaluation.

Sorry for my grammar and english. Perhaps someone can restate this in a more
readable way. English is not my first language and I'm not a great writer, but
I hope at least the essence of the ideas behind this proposal pass through and
can contribute to the general discussion.

------
crystaln
This is a great indicator that Paul Graham's oft displayed obliviousness to
issues of morality and fairness in capitalism is being challenged within YC.
Good news.

------
JoeAltmaier
This already happens in lots of setups: social security, pensions, allowances,
annuities. So there's lots to look at without setting up some stilted
experiments?

~~~
rorykoehler
None of those are basic income or even offer remotely the same benefits as a
basic income.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Now you're just being stubborn. Regular incomes that happen whether you work
or now, are almost identical to the BI. How are those example different?
Constructive arguments are more interesting than "No they aren't, neener
neener".

~~~
rorykoehler
Hi Joe, sorry to come across that way to you. They're not the same because:

-Social security (means tested, dehumanising and bad for self-worth/esteem) -Pensions (only handed out to older people who are probably in a less creative phase of their lives) -Allowances (whilst close it is unlikely to be completely unconditional and usually tied to an emotional/familial bond which comes with it's own set of baggage) -Annuities (this is the closest of the lot but generally only rich people experience this so it would be interesting to see what happens when given to less well off sections of society).

Unconditional basic income deserves to be studied from a scientific
perspective. Too many of our major political decisions are based on anecdotal
evidence and they therefore don't achieve what they presumably set out to
achieve. Unconditional basic income is a unique concept with it's own unique
set of inputs and outcomes just as the concepts your mentioned are. We cannot
just assume outcomes as that is bad science. We have to implement, test and
analyse our results.

If you are interested in this approach to governance I highly recommend
reading this article to stimulate your interest:
[http://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/2015/12/08/this-is-why-
finlan...](http://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/2015/12/08/this-is-why-finland-is-
able-to-implement-the-basic-income-experiment/)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The 'unconditional' part is only important in the beginning. Once the subject
qualifies (begins receiving the annuity) then the criterion is irrelevant to
studying their behavior while receiving the benefit.

For the person receiving them, those things listed offer the same benefits as
BI - money regularly received no matter how you behave. To determine what
effect that has on people, then we need simply record those results to get a
large data set.

To fund even a tiny study (a dozen people?) for a tiny amount of time (5
years?) would cost an exorbitant amount. Its kind of silly to even talk about.
Especially when we have data sets of millions of people in almost the same
circumstances.

I read this proposal as absurd. Its typical of Silicon Valley to imagine
getting results from a tiny study (focus groups etc) that are worth anything.

------
amedstudent1
>Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?

Surely I'm not the only one offended by this? Lost respect after reading this.

------
DominikR
> 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not
> being able to eat as a way to motivate people.

Is this really a problem in Western societies? I haven't heard of famines or
people starving to death here.

I believe that most people work for social status, so they can keep up with
the people surrounding them.

> I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity
> without some version of guaranteed income.

Is this a good way to recruit researchers? After all you wouldn't want the
researchers just to produce a paper that reinforces what you believe already.

~~~
melbourne_mat
"Is this really a problem in Western societies?"

All the people you know are not starving. There are however many folks - even
in rich countries - who would not eat without the help of charity programs.
Many of them are living on the streets.

~~~
DominikR
Objectively no one has to fear starving to death as in our societies we
collectively make sure that this is not possible.

It doesn't matter how exactly this is organised, but it is a fact that we do.

This can also be proven by the fact that there are exactly 0 cases of people
starving to death here.

------
mrschwabe
Interesting project, but personally I would be more interested to see the
funding of a study on "basic financial freedom".

The test is quite similar, but instead of giving them a basic income
participants are still required create their own income - however, they no
longer have to pay taxes on their income. They are encouraged to create
businesses and those businesses are also free from tax, and those employed by
said businesses are also free from tax.

50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used to allow
government to take our money ;)

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
So are they no longer allowed to use public roads? How about public utilities?
Does the fire department show up at their "un taxed" businesses, how about the
police? Can they hire students that received their education from public
schools? The fact that there existed a group of people that posted that modern
society would be even remotely possible without government is far more likely
to be seen as ridiculous in 50 years.

~~~
mrschwabe
Yes they would have access to all that stuff because their taxes would be paid
for by YC as part of the program.

------
puppetmaster3
Why not use primates?

They won't game the results. There was some research done, I forget date and
author, something about 'origin of species'

------
branchless
It's the price of land. If you give people basic income the price of land will
rise to consume all other disposable income.

Land value tax.

------
hectorxp
Did you mean everyone or US-everyone? There's a subtle difference there. Most
comments here are so US-specific.

------
jgord
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

I agree with the fundamental dogma that startups are the best way we know to
create good technology, which in turn benefits everyone. ie. the big wealth
creators are discovering new resources and creating better technology. ( The
big new resources are in space, or perhaps deep sea, so your back to startups
to get there.)

Extrapolating, it seems reasonable that within 15 years the cost of many
manufactured items will fall dramatically and quality will go up - when 3D
printing can print electronics and plastics intermingled together at good
resolution, that will mean all our vacuum cleaners / iphones / laptops / TVs /
cars / bikes / shoes are printed whole instead of assembling them from parts.

Aside from consumer goods, we still all need high quality and cheap solutions
for : education, energy, transport and housing.

Cheap, high quality [customisable!] housing might actually be solved by 3D
printing also [ but maybe you'll just end up paying more for rights to the
land plot or sky space to host your dream pad ? ]

Its worth mentioning the obvious, that Startups don't exist in a vacuum, they
need the backdrop of founders and staff who are highly educated [ not to
mention a functioning economy with capital, infrastructure, internet ]

Personally, if someone gave me a basic income and a project budget, I would
spend it on establishing Math Circles for students aged 10 to 15. ( My ideal
version of math circles involves some hands-on programming in javascript,
coupled with the typical tricky math problems to solve -
[https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/mathcircle-
with-c...](https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/mathcircle-with-code) ).
Id also like to see how we could scale out Math Circles by delivering them
online.

Education via this Math Circle format is a very long term technology
investment, but has a high bang for buck in terms of upside for the planet and
our species. As a parent it seems clear to me, we cant wait around for the
government or established institutions to innovate in education - it has to be
done in parallel and outside of the constraints of a formal bureaucracy.

Think of each student as a startup you're funding - in that long tail there
might be one or two Adas, Edisons, Einsteins or Mirzakhanis wherein almost all
future 'value' lies.. but we're also making a wider pyramid of culture,
diffusing out into the general milieu of artists, nurses, marketers, designers
a slightly higher level of facility and intuition in math and science.

------
lukasm
A leverage against slumlords in the same way social media gives leverage to
consumers against companies

------
patcon
Based on my own experiences of transitioning voluntarily into homelessness, I
am very excited by the focus on lowering the cost of living. Living more
simply, and getting there by a slow and intentional process (NOT coercive or
painful), leads to more enjoyment of life, and less fear of failure. Funny how
living in the presumed failure state of western society recalibrates your
instincts.

I find myself wishing that something like the process I went through could be
institutionalized to a degree. For example, I had to be previously
indoctrinated on the value of minimalist living. I had to be convinced that
that was something that I wanted. And I had to consider all my habits and
responsibilities, and what I might be willing to give up to get me to
different outcomes. I had to understand how cheap it could be to exist in the
city in which I live, and then cut in order to get there. I had to let friends
know of my goals, and hope that we could create new traditions that sacrificed
little and perhaps even strengthened our relationship. The whole time, you are
altering your habits, testing them out before removing the harness. For
example, when I wanted to stop requiring my bathroom space, I started going to
the gym every morning to shower. Once I was used to that in my daily routine,
I then started doing fitness and running while I was there. And when I didn't
want to come back for food, I started putting together a minimalist meal plan
that I could prepare in advance and take with me for the day. Reworking my
habits and needs was almost a full-time job for a few months. Anyhow, I would
never assume most people would want to take it as far as I did. Everyone's
path would be different, as their responsibilities and routines differ. But
that slow process of change if life-altering.

I am now living in San Francisco for perhaps $300/month, and living very
happily (perhaps moreso than ever), although El Nino is a recent complicating
factor :) I will likely upgrade from hammock tent to camper in the near
future, as I don't want to strain relationships with my partner. But up till
now, it's worked very well.

And I want to clarify that I would never see minimalism the goal, but just a
means to happiness and resilience. In any process that might resemble my own
journey, taking something away should always be a choice made for future
benefit.

Perhaps making that benefit more concrete could be part of any
institutionalized program. Pay generously at first, but then expect costs to
come down, and the more they come down, the more "reward". Perhaps that could
be a retirement bonus. Or access to some sort of YC investment portfolio that
would essentially be retirement reward. So the cheaper you learn to live,
under the guidance of the program, the more of a nest-egg you earn.

Anyhow, apologies if this is less than coherent -- lots of thoughts in my head
on this topic. I am very not in the "tech solutionism camp", and am pretty
self-aware that my experience would be less a prescribed path, but rather a
general template :)

~~~
dang
You should write a longer description of these experiences and post it to HN.
It seems likely to interest people.

~~~
saturdayplace
Moved and seconded

------
lars
This seems a little myopic. What distinguishes basic income from the welfare
systems implemented in, say, northern Europe? Seems like there are many
countries that have had basic income for decades. Couldn't you look to them
and have most questions answered?

~~~
namenotrequired
The difference is basic income is for everyone.

------
reasonality
Almost sounds like the plot for "Trading places".

------
imgabe
Where do I volunteer to be a test subject in this study?

~~~
realkitkat
+1. I am a willing test subject. where do I sign-up? That said - given the
cost of living here in CA, I would assume that in the eventuality of becoming
unemployed for an extended period of time, I couldn't support myself with the
basic income only and would need to look into moving to some less expensive
areas. In fact, this is what was suggested in some discussion ( couldn't find
a link ) I remember reading relative to Finnish basic income experiment cited
in some posts here. E.g. unless basic income would vary based on cost of
living in your region, it would effectively result as people relying solely on
it having to abandon living in more expensive cities and areas. Which
seemingly is a notion few politicians would want to put forward when
introducing basic income. But when you introduce regional differences in level
of income, you open a can of worms that seemingly leads to all kinds of
potential abuse, managing which then prevents dismantling of bureaucracy that
was the whole idea to begin with.

~~~
imgabe
That would be an interesting quirk. I think basing it on the average cost of
living for the country would make sense. It might have a helpful side effect
of revitalizing some dying towns if a bunch of people move to lower CoL areas
to stretch their basic income further.

------
curiousgeorgio
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

The greatest thing a startup can do to increase the prosperity of everyone is
simply continue trying to be successful, within legal bounds. Every startup is
inherently working to lower the cost of living, whether that's their stated
goal or not. Even a seemingly useless app startup - if it becomes successful -
will (1) add jobs to the economy, (2) give employees and their families more
purpose and well-being (working brings people fulfillment and joy), and (3)
contribute to lowering the cost of living[1].

Obviously, some startup industries (education, medicine, etc.) have a more
direct influence on this process than others, but they all contribute in
indirect ways to increased prosperity overall - even if motivated by purely
"greedy", capitalistic ideals.

If basic income were somehow to be implemented by providing basic _needs_
(food, shelter, clothing, etc. rather than currency) without the involvement
of other people/companies _providing_ those needs, then I believe it could
work. The trouble is, even in a world full of automation (and less need for
typical jobs), the resources will still be controlled by organizations,
governments, and people - and not always the people who have the most need for
them. In that environment (and lets face it, certain people, countries,
organizations, etc. will always be better suited at doing things than others),
the economy _is_ actually zero-sum in the meta sense. No one can consume
without another party producing - even if the producers at some point are just
owners of machines. And in a competitive economy, things like basic income
just become factored into the cost of living, so it's kind of a moot point.

From another angle, if basic income is ever implemented in terms of currency
($x per month), it will _not_ solve poverty. I have plenty of first-hand
experience to tell you that a large number of people will _choose_ to live in
poverty (or forgo what most of us consider to be basic necessities) by
spending that money in foolish ways (gambling, addictions, frivolous
purchases, etc). Those people will not accept responsibility for having wasted
the money, and we'll be right back to where we are now: people demanding more
welfare services from the government.

[1] A successful but useless (practically-speaking) app/game means that people
are willing to pay for it. Paying for a good or service that otherwise would
not exist contributes in indirect ways to technological progress (e.g., by
gaining more adoption, the technologies powering that app will be in a better
position to improve and contribute to aspects of our lives that have more
practical value), including more investment into things that _do_ improve our
quality of life per dollar spent.

------
seanabrahams
I am shocked there's no mention of Star Trek in this discussion. And I shall
remedy it!

"

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)](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985443)

~~~
eaandkw
I have read a few economic thoughts about Star Trek and something called
Paracon or "Participatory Economics" was economic theories that happened in a
"post scarcity economic" world. That would imply your replicators and such.
With 3d printing and robotic displacing a lot of jobs that would be something
to consider.

------
ianamartin
I'm half-way tempted to apply for this despite the fact that a) I'm not moving
from NYC to San Francisco, and b) I'm probably not qualified.

In spite of that, I have some real questions and comments about the
constraints on a project like this.

1\. What's the budget for this?

In order to get any generalizable data, you'd have to set up your sample plan
to be geographically and demographically diverse. In an ideal world, you'd
need to provide for 1,800 subjects to get genuinely usable data. Research is
rarely ideal, and you can infer from smaller samples, but how many subjects
are we talking about? 5? 10? 100? 500? 1,000? Also, what constitutes a sample?
Individual or household? (see 2, paragraph 2 below)

2\. What constitutes Basic Income?

I'd argue that Basic Income represents enough for all human needs to be
fulfilled to some arbitrarily minimal extent. Unlike some other comments, I
include the need for entertainment and sex among basic human needs. As well as
catastrophic health care. Does that mean everyone gets a free PS 4? No. And I
also don't mean paying for prostitutes. But some budget for entertainment of
some kind makes sense to me, as does a budget for dating.

Anything short of that fails, in my opinion, to be a basic income. It's more
like welfare for everyone, which is conceptually different, in my opinion. I
also think Basic Income should be adjusted for location and household size.
Although it might not be the right metric, the most convenient one we have is
centuries of data about total household income vs. household size. That's how
the Census Bureau defines the poverty threshold, for example.

There are a lot of different ways to think about this, and my opinions above
are just that: opinions. The point I'm trying to make is that if this
experiment is going to happen, what's the best possible scenario for measuring
something useful?

3\. How do we research what is happening without affecting the outcome?

I actually have an answer to this one. I think it's inevitable that any time a
government agency is processing payments, there are at least some hoops to
jump through. Welfare has its process, as does unemployment. It's reasonable
to think we can design a brief questionnaire that tracks certain key variables
like productivity, happiness, artistic endeavors, anxiety (bonus points for
using a wearable device to track stress levels?? Maybe?) . . . whatever. I'm
not sure what those should be.

But it could be structured in a way that is realistic enough that you wouldn't
do any obvious damage to the study by observation. Once your location and
status have been established, the benefits do not change depending on your
answers. But you have to check in and request a payment on the 25th and 10 of
every month (to guarantee payments on the 1st and 15th).

4\. It's important to note that there will be some people who adjust to
whatever income they are making and do nothing beyond that. I don't know what
percentage that is, but the funders have to understand that at least some
people will do nothing but sit around and drink or play video games, and that
can't be a reason to cut them off, otherwise, it really biases things in a bad
way.

5\. If this is able to be truly representative, then you would have to expect
at least some percent of the participants in the experiment to get into legal
trouble.

What do we do with them?

If you set a condition that people stay out of legal trouble to get the
benefits (a genuinely real scenario if we are trying to model how this might
be implemented in the future), then you are tampering with your sample.

If you don't attach such a condition, you're going to draw a huge amount of
criticism for paying people to be in jail, potentially funding criminal
operations of various kinds, and there will be a small portion of people who
choose to go to jail who have been there before and are comfortable with it
and live extremely cheaply while racking up the savings. That's a tough one.

6\. Going back to budget: is there enough to do control vs. group testing?

By that, I mean we have a control group that answers the same survey every two
weeks, but only gets a small incentive to do so. Nothing even close to a basic
income. Enough to get them to hit a website and answer a 5-minute
questionnaire about their life for the last two weeks, identical to the one
the BI people are required to answer for their payments.

And how many strategies can we afford to test? If we have rep sample control,
then we can rep sample a variety of strategies: pro-rated based on location
and household size, flat BI same for everyone, or other nuanced approaches.

I guess I've really seriously gone and buried the lede here, but Sam, what is
the scope of this project? My experience in research is that there's not
really an analogue to the MVP in the startup world.

Research needs to be rigorous and correct from the outset. You can't hack
something together that mostly works and then see if it gets traction and find
bigger funders if it does. I'm not suggesting that's your line of thinking,
but this is a _big_ project.

Getting meaningful, generalizable data about this is going to cost a lot.

~~~
undersuit
I don't think adjusting Federal BI for location is the right tact. You'd have
to much bureaucracy at the federal levels dealing with fraud, household moves,
and city planning. I'd rather state, county, and cities enact their own BI
supplementation.

I guess maybe if we had tighter integration between Federal and States there
would be less problems with location variations, but then we bump into the
States Right's issue.

------
rbcgerard
How does this work with a broken immigration system?

------
caretStick
Tax net worth

------
bglazer
Both in regards to decreasing the cost of living and also increasing
prosperity for everyone, the clearest answer to me is to purposefully and
meaningfully increase investment in areas outside of San Francisco.

The Valley, through a variety of circumstances, is now home to the highest
concentration of technology companies, and is unsurprisingly one of the most
expensive places to live in the world.

The are known economic forces [1] that cause clustering of similar firms in
small areas, and there's no doubt that this is a net positive for both the
city and the individual businesses, at least at first. The incredible
concentration both of talent and wealth in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is
a clear testament to the power of physical proximity.

However, I urge the technology community and specifically Y Combinator to
seriously reconsider the notion that all of technology must happen on a
peninsula in central California.

How this decreases the cost of living is obvious. I live in Memphis TN and I
pay $500 a month on my mortgage. Further, the city of Memphis and many other
cities in the US are in serious need of both talented young people and
economic development. The "brain drain" is a real and devastating effect of
compressing the technology ecosystem onto the West Coast. Reversing the brain
drain would bring leadership, talent, and dollars to areas that need it.

I'd like to specifically call out YC for this section of their FAQ:

> Can we do it without moving to where you are?

> Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind
> the rest.

In every other aspect of their model, YC is open to all reasonable
possibilities. They fund photo sharing apps and nuclear reactors, women and
men, young and old, but NOT people who won't move to SF. This reasoning is
apparently based on just a few examples. Thus, the idea that constant physical
availability is a fundamentally important part funding is just conjecture.

This policy and the attitude behind it are essentially opposed to the ethos of
the technologist. How does one change the world by adding incrementally to the
wealth of the Bay Area? Also, it's an absurdity that I have to mention that
the __internet __was invented so that we wouldn 't have to do stuff like this
anymore.

This also addresses the issue of diversity. If you want more diverse people,
go to where they live. I find it an amusing contradiction that many of the
people who cringe at the idea of moving to the repressive "Deep South" of
Tennessee would find themselves working with people who aren't white dudes for
the the first time if they ever did move.

So, I urge YC and the tech community at large to spread out from just the bay
area. Reconsider the cities you came from. Be bold and try to find the
opportunities that are waiting outside Silicon Valley.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster)

------
pnathan
> decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well.

Hi Sam,

I'm going to not read through 747+ comments, I'm sorry.

Right now, in the best cities in the nation, the cost of living is rising
significantly. These cities have a deep job pool, they are making serious
efforts on sustainability, have wide and varied culture and are generally more
efficient (and often better) ways to live[0].

However, because of the cost of living is rising so steeply, it is forcing
people of median income and below to spread out into the suburbs, increasing
commute cost (and pollution), as well as the variety of issues suburbia causes
for the environment and sustaininable living[1]. Among the contributing
factors here is childrearing, which takes extra space - space which is
extremely expensive to rent or purchase in a city. This is an incredibly
significant issue as we iterate this game several times.

I'd like to bring to your attention several interlinked aspects that play out
here:

\- higher housing density is more sustainable

\- highly effective transit networks decrease pollution

\- dense housing suitable for long-term family residences is very hard to
find.

I'm not persuaded that a start-up (a rapidly growing, high growth company)
will be able to achieve success in these areas, because of the time horizon
needed for these problems to be dealt with is on the 20+ year timespan.
However, I'll argue that a company could make a dent in several of these
areas:

\- mixed use high-rises that are designed for families: offices, schools,
playgrounds, etc included[2]. This would be a shift from the typical luxury
condo build and, I'd argue, would find a very solid niche in the modern
urbanist movement. I would argue that an _affordability_ policy could go hand
in hand with this, with certain entities eating some of the rental/purchase
cost of these properties.

\- Increase transit effectiveness. YC is already making a play in this area
with Remix[3], but I think that doubling down on making transit costs and
benefits more effective could really be a game changer. Demonstrating the very
real cost of commuting would assist in the people inclined towards Green
thought; figuring out how to make transit a _pleasant_ experience would assist
in getting the people not inclined to deal with the occasional horror story to
support and vote for transit.

\- In the same vein, platforms and tools that directly support pleasant
densification will help. An example of this for someone _in_ a dense
neighborhood is Walc[4]. But, looking at _policy_ and assisting policy becomes
a major political play here.

Ultimately, what I fear the actual solution will look like here a broad-based
housing price/rent control system, where _everyone_ who isn't a
multimillionaire who wants to live in a city has to be in a rent-controlled
system, paid out by the local government. What we're seeing in Seattle is a
bit of a tulip situation: people buying are buying at high prices because the
sellers are aware they can sell at high prices, this ratchets the next unit
price up; the demand is so high that it's forcing prices up very fast.

[0]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?_r=0)

[1] [http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/26/second-life-
cyc...](http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/26/second-life-cycle-blues)

[2] An arcology, yes. :-)

[3] [http://getremix.com/](http://getremix.com/)

[4] [http://www.walc.me/](http://www.walc.me/)

------
ttcbj
I think the most interesting thing YC could do to promote prosperity in the US
is some kind of 'fellowship' for technologists with an interest in helping the
impoverished to 'embed' with social service organizations and try to learn how
to help them.

I don't think most people who frequent HN, no matter how well intentioned,
understand the factors that cause people to be stuck in poverty, myself
included. I think you would have to get close to the problem to have really
useful ideas. I have ideas, but they are more like questions to be honest.

Some ideas I have thought about in the past:

* An app that helps people learn that they are in a failing school district, and helps them systematically develop a plan to get out of it. I live in St. Louis, and around the time of the This American Life episodes on the Ferguson schools, I spent a lot of time wondering how you end up sending your kids to the worst of the 550 public school districts in the state. The question in this case is: what are the characteristics of people who send their kids to bad schools, and to what extent can they help themselves if given the right tools?

* An app that helps people find others to share resources with (shared living, etc). The idea here is that poverty may be driven by the breakdown of the family, which provides first-line social insurance when working well. Kind of like match.com for poor people with kids looking to team up. The question here is: Is there some subset of improverished people who are very high-functioning, but so limited by childcare and low-wealth that they cannot lift themselves out of poverty. If so, could these people be matched and help each other by sharing resources?

* Trying to create a program that directly funnels kids from underperforming schools into computer programming and IT jobs without going to college. Perhaps to be hired by large corporations who will ultimately spring for night-school to round out their education. Here, I am thinking about a section from the book The Prize, where a bunch of Newark teachers go to insane lengths to try to get one kid with some athletic talent enough tutoring that he can achieve an ACT score of like 14 and qualify for a college scholarship. That strikes me as significantly less scalable than a program that tries to give poor kids a marketable set of skills coming out of high school. It would still be a small set of kids, but maybe larger than the number who have athletic talent (and its not clear athletic scholarships yield good outcomes anyway). The questions here: Could some non-trivial group of impoverished high school kids be funneled directly into employment with the right vocational technical skills and support from major corporations?

With all these kinds of ideas, however, I think you would have to get really
close to the people you are trying to serve to have any chance of building
something that would help them. And that means 'embedding' with them for a
non-trivial period and really trying to figure out what will work.

None of these ideas are like startups, in the sense that I think in the best
case scenario they aren't likely to scale very well. I think they are more
likely to cherry pick a small number of resourceful/talented people who might
otherwise have remained mired in poverty.

That's better than nothing, but my intuition is that when you get into the
details of poverty that there are no highly scalable solutions. Everything is
going to be messy. These stories have informed my opinions on messiness:

Netflix Rich Hill Undefeated Waiting for Superman

Audio This American Life on Ferguson Schools

Books Our Kids (Putnam) The Prize Work Hard be Nice

Articles
[http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinella...](http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinellas-
failure-factories/5-schools-segregation/)

------
JoblessWonder
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

I think it might be best to create a different thread since this is a separate
and important question than the "Basic Income" debate that is also interesting
and happening in the same comments. Either way, here are my thoughts:

You can take that question a few of different ways. What can all startups do
within their current processes/products? What is a startup idea that will
increase prosperity for everyone? What can startups do in addition to their
current product to help prosperity for everyone?

I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest
individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else. I think
having productive people in our society who do not need to worry about the
basic needs will increase the success of our society. If you don't agree with
me on that, then everything below is probably not what you are looking for.

I think that setting aside funding regularly to donate to non-affiliated non-
profits would be a great start. Most startups don't have the capacity (or
desire) to reinvent themselves as charitable organizations. Creating a curated
list of non-profits across different factors that contribute to prosperity
(education, housing, jobs) and encouraging companies to commit to donating
would help. I taught a relationship skills class with my wife for people on
public assistance for the past 5 years until our federal grant ended last
fall. I honestly believe helping those couples be in a better relationship
helps them be better parents which gives the kids a greater chance to succeed.
However, when the grant ended we had to close up shop and shut down the whole
organization. Funding for these types of programs is so hard to come by that
adding anything to the pool would be a great first step.

As far as what sort of startups can be developed to help increase prosperity I
think you can segment it again into two views: The long view or the short
view. The long view is done by helping ensure the future generation's
increased prosperity. Things like increased quality of education and training,
family life, and access to technology.

The short view ones are things that would improve access to a basic level of
housing, food, healthcare and education. Worrying about those things (and
probably more) are going to make it harder for people to be successful. It
isn't impossible, just more difficult. I think that gathering and analyzing
data would be a great start for a startup. There is a ton of information out
there. The grant I mentioned above collected surveys from thousands of couples
nationwide over a period of years. I'm sure there are grants funding programs
that are delivering information on all types of topics. Utilizing that
information to help prioritize what is effective or whatever you can glean
from it would be an interesting startup. Using that information to develop a
wishlist of product ideas to fund would be interesting for a VC.

(This isn't my best writing/thinking. It is just sort of a brain dump to
hopefully fuel some comments by someone.)

~~~
tinym
>I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest
individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else.

This is an aside, and I don't particularly want to evaluate it as good or bad,
but this statement is striking compared to the neoliberal idea of 'a rising
tide lifts all boats' \- i.e. increasing general prosperty raises prosperity
for the lowest individuals.

~~~
JoblessWonder
Thanks for responding. I never really thought about how that might be a
controversial opinion but it does ring true the more I think about it. My
self-described "libertarian" friends don't believe in the same social policies
I do and don't believe in the same correlations between social policies and
economic success.

I'm sure you already knew this but I figured I'd share it anyways: After
thinking about it last night I decided I believed in a "trickle up effect" and
then went to google it, thinking it a nice take on the "trickle down effect,"
only to find that "trickle up effect" was the original and "trickle down" was
apparently the clever take down... Sigh. Guess I should have paid more
attention in Economics.

Anyways, like most economic theories I'm sure there are a myriad of reasons
why it might not work or be the most effective (which you graciously decided
to not go into.)

------
IanDrake
I can't take this seriously.

>(Questions about how a program like this would affect overall cost of living
are beyond our scope, but obviously important.)

No, that's not just "obviously important". It's practically the _ONLY_ thing
that's important. If basic income raises the cost of living to the point where
it negates the effect of having it, then basic income is meaningless.

Here's your study.

1) Bring one piece of candy into an elementary school class.

2) Ask all the kids what they'll do to get that piece of candy.

3) They'll pretty much do anything.

4) Next, bring bags of candy into another elementary school class, give one
bag to each student.

5) Now brandish a piece of candy and ask what they'll do to get it.

6) They're pretty much ignoring you at this point.

Money has no value without scarcity and work has no value without ownership of
it's rewards.

Basic income makes money less scarce and (to pay for basic income) steals from
people who work.

~~~
nl
Right. All of this is true.

But the point of a Basic Income is that it substitutes for other forms of
income support/welfare.

That's supposed to _increase_ the incentive to work, because many forms of
welfare are income dependent. For example, we often hear reports of parents
who refuse to work because they'll lose some or all welfare payments and their
wages will be net worse off.

If everyone gets the basic income, then _maybe_ this effect can be overcome.
There's some reason to think this could be true - the marginal benefit of $1
extra at low income levels is much more than at higher levels.

It's worth noting that many conservatives support a basic income because of
this, and because the system will be much less complicated and reduce the
number of government programs.

------
jakeogh
"send them a cheque for $10,000 and increase their taxes by ~$10,000" which
(suprise) just wastes people's time and money.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Replace "cheque" with "direct deposit" and what time is wasted? You have to do
taxes every year anyways.

And what little time is wasted is offset by the sense of security that
$200/week is going into your bank account every week like clockwork no matter
happens to you or your job.

~~~
jakeogh
I take issue with the idea that government should use violence to take from
some people and give to others, the "You have to" (or we throw you on a cage
or worse) is the problem.

The money and time wasted is the huge infrastructure to enforce the ever
growing list of restrictions.

~~~
bryanlarsen
And I take issue with the idea that taxes are theft. Without society, you'd be
a subsistence farmer. Any income you earn above that of a subsistence farmer
is enabled by society.

~~~
jakeogh
Society exists independent of taxes, for example we didnt always have a
federal income tax, and there are states without state income tax now. There
are other ways gov can raise money.

~~~
harryh
All of the ways that the government can raise money involves taking it from
people. You're making a distinction without a difference.

~~~
jakeogh
People can decide to give voluntarily, they may decide it's a good investment.
They may even vote to partly decide what it goes to. The "nobody would pay"
standard response is just wrong.

~~~
harryh
Because the free rider problem is a figment of people's imagination.

Right.

------
nunobrito
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.

~~~
Throwaway23412
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.

~~~
nunobrito
So my comment gets downvoted for pointing out racism in a y-combinator thread.
The original post from the person to whom I've replied seems to have been
rewritten and now my own previous answer is out of context. Great.

Maybe some people around here assume racism as characteristic of a single
group, not as a human characteristic that we all share alike. Perhaps helps to
quote what "racist" is described on a dictionary: "a belief that race is the
primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences
produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/racism)

For the record, the original poster mentioned that people of a given race were
not paying bills, and that another given race was enforcing punitive
legislation, for that reason riots spun at some point. I just disagreed with
such point of view.

Reducing a complex problem such as Ferguson (and others) to colors is not
correct. But heck, just downvote the one that tries to point that out. Even
the original poster corrected his comment, so I'm happy to see some reflection
happening.

~~~
tptacek
I stand by everything I wrote in my original comment and have to add that I
really don't understand anything you're trying to say here.

------
dkraft
y'all are just using big words to express income redistribution. which.
doesn't. work.

simply take the extreme case where everyone gets free resources. it is
unsustainable.

natural selection is sustainable. that's how we got here.

anything else is just a deferment of the inevitable.

~~~
sspiff
I think this is an oversimplifying view of reality.

Taking the most extreme case (free everything) and pointing out it's
impossible (without referencing a single data point of evidence no less) is
pointless.

Basic income is not about people not having to work for a living, it's a
proposed restructuring of the social security that many nation states already
have in place. That is, a simple basic income formula replacing complex and
hard/expensive to police support formulas for the sick, elderly and/or
unemployed. One of the leading arguments for these experiments is how they
allow governments to downsize their workforce, thus lowering the cost for the
taxpaying segment society.

As far as I know, early real world experiments are just now being spun up (in
the Netherlands and Finland, for example), and so far all we have is
simulation and theories from economists. That's not enough data to rule out
the entire model.

You are of course welcome to have your own opinion and gut feeling about the
matter, but until someone proves your point, I remain unconvinced.

