
Why we should all have a basic income - teslacar
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income?income
======
ominous
Isn't the question "Why should we pay a basic income" instead of "Why should
we receive"? No amount of "should receive" can balance zero amount of "should
pay". The ones that pay are the ones that need convincing.

Unless both amounts are zero: zero reasons to pay and zero reasons to receive
is a fine solution.

~~~
_rpd
The version of basic income advocated by some conservatives abolishes all
other welfare programs to fund basic income, the idea being to eliminate
expenditure on means testing overhead.

~~~
nonsince
But I'm a wooly liberal and I agree with that, if you keep the BI high enough
to truly replace the need for it. I would rather everyone had a basic, flat
rate that had basically 0 bureaucratic expense to dole out. Maybe you could
have a pension-like program where if you are over retirement age or can't work
you get extra pay, but any more complexity than that is probably not worth the
wastage that comes with it.

If I'm missing something here, please tell me.

~~~
_rpd
There are a couple of issues.

The first is that the means testing ensures that a small minority of the
population receives welfare. If you dissolve the entire apparatus, and
distribute the proceeds to all working adults then, in the US, it only comes
out to something like $5-6k per year per person. Certainly below the 'living
wage' $15/hr = $30k/yr + 'cost of living' adjustments that some are calling
for (although this would require almost triple current tax revenues).

The second is that each and every welfare program is the end result of a hard
fought political battle, and not a single program will go quietly into the
good night. The optics of people suffering due to a particular lost welfare
program will receive orders of magnitude more attention than the provision of
basic income, no matter how generous. Basic income will become status quo, but
sharp recriminations will go on, until at last each and every program will be
reestablished. This is more likely the closer the level of basic income is to
the $5k "cost saver."

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Kinnard
The one thing I don't get about the Basic Income push is . . . what will be
done about inflation? With more and more money chasing the same amount of
resources, goods, and services, basic income would push up the overall price-
level and undo itself by pricing out those who live at the basic income level

. . . am I missing something?

~~~
intopieces
This is my question as well. If the UBI is $1000/month, doesn't that become
the new $0? But, this is what I figure, not being an economist, and just being
someone who really wants UBI to be a thing:

With an influx of cash, people will be able to buy more, which creates
incentives for actors in the market to create more products to eat up the new
cash. More products = competition, which keeps prices low. Plus, people
already have in mind how much they want to spend for a certain item. Take, for
example, peanut butter. Rather than raising the price, the makers do things
like decrease the amount of the product in the jar through redesigned
packaging.

Just my pet theory. What I wonder is for things with terrible competition
(rent, for example) what prevents those markets from just gobbling up the
gains.

~~~
Kalium
Is it perhaps possible that your hypothesis might not account particularly
well for inflation? One cannot pump cash arbitrarily into an economy with a
limited amount of value. Past a certain point, the scarcity of money changes.

If the UBI was $1,000,000/mo, I expect rents everywhere might soar and bread
might cost $10k a loaf. There's more money, but the scarcity of goods doesn't
change, so what happens is everything sprouts a couple of extra zeros. This is
what runaway inflation can look like.

------
Mz
Basic Income is a completely broken mental model. Some reasons:

1) Inflation.

The minute that $1000 hits your bank account, it will be worth less than you
think. Every social services program struggles with this fact.

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-
obsol...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsolete-
before-we-opened.html)

2\. Human Nature.

Everyone who writes these articles assumes that people are inherently good and
would make better decisions if freed from the evils of needing to earn a
paycheck. History tells us otherwise.

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/ancient-
wisd...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/ancient-wisdom-tells-
us-idle-hands-are.html)

3\. History tells us this does not work.

We have tried some version of this before. It works fine at the "testing"
stage where some small-ish group of committed, idealistic people come together
and decide to share and share alike. The minute it is opened up to the general
public and ALL people, no matter how badly they behave, are ENTITLED to their
share, it falls apart.

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

I could go on. And I have:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/industrial-r...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/industrial-
revolution-2-electronic.html)

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html)

------
hl5
UBI does not directly address drug use, mental health, indebtedness, or
homelessness. The idea that you can solve poverty by giving "free" money to
individuals who can not spend wisely while at the same time eliminating
nutritional and mental health programs can only have bad results.

~~~
dvtv75
You're focusing on just one group - those who don't have jobs. Consider that a
UBI would directly address bad employers, such as mine. Let me explain the
situation, a very common one where I am:

My employer feels that, because he pays me minimum wage for some hours a week,
I owe him my complete allegiance. I should work very hard for him during my
work hours, and then we have a post-work meeting that assesses our
productivity for the day, and our mistakes - which also includes hardware
failures. The IT department just notes "Operator error" when a piece of
equipment fails. This meeting is mandatory and unpaid, an illegal combination.
If I refused to attend, even though it's illegal for the boss to do so, I
would be fired. Most catch-up work (when their antique equipment fails) is
unpaid, too. I'm owed several thousand dollars in back pay, including public
holidays (which they are legally obligated to pay me for), which I will never
see.

According to my employer, the role includes training everyone who comes
through the door, supervising them in every aspect of what they do, and if
they screw up the finger gets pointed at me. (If you looked at my actual
contract, you would see that this is not a job requirement.) If computer
equipment fails, and we have a 21 year old box running some crucial software
which is built by the corporation (so updating it to support a modern machine
is no problem), I'm expected to diagnose it and offer solutions just because I
have a CS degree. Again, this is not in my contract. I don't even have the
superuser passwords, but it's still my job in their eyes. I have a raft of
further responsibilities, including ensuring that some high-end equipment
works correctly even though I'm not allowed to touch it.

I did once ask for a pay increase, but I was told that there aren't many jobs
around here so if I don't like it, I can quit and good luck getting another
job with the reference they were threatening to give me.

A UBI would mean I could quit ("Take this job and shovel it") and look for an
actual job where the staff are valued, perhaps even save enough to leave the
city and look everywhere around the country. The lack of a UBI (as well as the
governmental and social requirement to accept any "reasonable" job) means that
I have to suck it up and keep working.

That would be the most powerful reason to implement a UBI, to my mind: the
ability to tell bad employers that you don't need them to live.

~~~
geezerjay
I don't see how UBI is a solution for that problem. That problem may be
perpetuated by your unwillingness no quit, which may be tied to your income
level, but UBI doesn't affect your unwillingness to search for alternatives or
even prepare to quit.

Bad employers are enabled by tolerant employees. Establishing a side-income
scheme does nothing to address how employees are willing to be mistreated.

~~~
jakelazaroff
"Tolerant" employees often don't have a choice if there is more demand than
supply for jobs in a market. UBI removes some of the coercive power the
employer has, since employees aren't forced to choose between their job and
food/a place to live/etc.

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heycomeoncomeon
I really wish the notion that wealth equals income would die. I too believed
that the distribution of income is what our problem is in our economy. But
after learning how real economics works it doesn't matter how much money goes
where. What matters is production. Remember currency has no actual value
unless something is being produced. If money is redistributed in one area you
are not producing anything. What you are doing is reallocating production from
one business sector to another. Recall the barter system, which worked for
thousands of years. You are exchanging your product/service for something
else. Currency is a means to divide out production.

~~~
dTal
I think you've got the premise of Basic Income back to front. No one is
suggesting that handing out money creates wealth. Rather, the premise is that
the system is imbalanced, that as things stand the money distribution is not
an accurate representation of value provided.

Take Warren Buffet. Did he really contribute 76 billion dollars worth of value
to society? I don't think so, and I don't think even Buffet himself does (he
has said that to spend his vast accumulated fortune on himself would divert
resources from important things). But once you make beyond a certain amount
it's almost hard not to make more, without doing anything at all! Here's[1] an
interesting personal account of this on our very own HN.

Conversely, someone at the bottom of the ladder can work 60-80 hour weeks in
multiple jobs and barely make ends meet, let alone save.

I would even argue that an unemployed person actively seeking work is probably
contributing various forms of value merely by existing - most obviously in the
form of liquidity to the employment market, but also in all the other ways a
living person is valuable - they listen and talk, make friends, form opinions,
vote, and otherwise reinforce the fabric of society (hence why it is still a
tragedy if such a person gets hit by a train, and a crime if they are
murdered).

Moving further down still, when push comes to shove, most people would agree
that even the most miserable, useless wretch does not deserve to die, if the
resources for their survival are readily available. There is value, moral
value, in compassion. A society that takes this view is spiritually wealthier.

So you have a scenario where, monetarily, the people at the top are
systemically overvalued, and the people at the bottom systemically
undervalued. This seems to be a deep property of the system that can't be
fixed by fiddling taxes within the existing framework - money trickles up,
where it accumulates. Closing the loop with a basic income, even a nominal
one, is a direct and practical solution that doesn't have to hurt anyone.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698121)

~~~
crestedtazo
Is "back to front" how Brits say "backwards"?

------
gumby
As far as inflation goes: think of money as a signalling mechanism, not as a
reserve of wealth. This is true for the wealthy, and as the marginal cost of
producing goods drops, it becomes true for more and more of the population.
When factories can more flexibly adjust production, you'll find increased
demand for, say, iPhones, and decreased demand for, say, TVs, will shift
production and damp the price inflation.

Secondly, consider that an economy without a UBI yet with mass unemployment
will suffer a liquidity trap. This is a more efficient way to fight that than
QE (which I'm not criticizing as it was the best tool available for the times)

------
malloryerik
Yuval Harari makes a good point: when it's said that "we" should "all" have a
"universal" basic income, aren't people actually talking about a national
basic income? Is the US or Norway going to provide a basic income to people in
Bangladesh? Or Iraq?

Harari discusses this in his book "Homo Deus". You can also see him discuss it
here:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E)

------
andriesm
What I really don't get is, why do everyone advocate for universal basic
income, instead of a negative income tax.

The negative income tax model achieves the same basic income with less
negative motivation for people who want to pursue work at the low-end.

It also avoids wastefully paying it to people who don't need it.

This is my inspiration :
[https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM](https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM)

